Yes It Will Rain (or Prayer for Our First Home)

^{to Mary Rose}

Here is our little yard  

too small            for a pool  
or chickens   let alone 

a game of tag or touch 
football       Then 

again   this stub-  
born patch  

of crabgrass  is just 
big enough      to get down  

flat on our backs 
with eyes wide open    and face 

the whole gray sky  just 
as a good drizzle 

begins                   I know  
we’ve had a monsoon  

of grieving to do  
which is why  

I promise    to lie 
beside you  

for as long as you like  
or need  

We’ll let our elbows 
kiss     under the downpour  

until we’re soaked  
like two huge nets  
                    left  

beside the sea  
whose heavy old

ropes strain  
stout with fish 

If we had to     we could  
feed a multitude  

with our sorrows  
If we had to  

we could name   a loss  
for every other  

drop of rain   All these  
foreign flowers 

you plant from pot  
to plot  

with muddy fingers  
—passion, jasmine, tuberose—  

we’ll sip 
the dew from them  

My darling                here
is the door I promised  

Here
is our broken bowl Here  

                        my hands  
In the home of our dreams  

the windows open  
in every  

weather—doused  
or dry—May we never  

be so parched 

Copyright © 2024 by Patrick Rosal. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 13, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“Mary Rose and I endured many decades trying to figure out where to live. Finally stable, our confusion was so deep, she’d often stop me, touch my hand, and say, ‘You live here.’ We felt unsettled about settling down. This poem proceeds from uncertainty, affirmation, supplication, promise, lament, a need to declare, ‘My beloved is my home, and I hers.’ Not to possess the water and the terrain, but to listen to it, fashioning a space together for song and work, for grieving, gathering, and rest. Amid our troubles, may we tend to each other and the land with such sacred (imperfect) attention.”
—Patrick Rosal