penzilla

John Milton wrote that.  People have prayed for rain for thousands of years.  In fact, while writing my dust runner poems, I spent countless hours researching the rain prayers for this poem:

Why the Dust Keeps Coming

Because you have no taro leaves
to pour over the bones,
and no cave for hiding them.
What use for rain
charms when children
drop dead from hunger
in the fields?  Or men
from whiskey around fires?
Or women, mouths filled
with a thousand spider eggs
of loneliness?  Who is left then
for chanting?  How could the rain
come when the dead
rise, dry as graves?
No stomach from black
calf and sheep.  No song
for the dollar-bird,
or pool of water
to drown a snake.
Your tongues are dry of prayers,
have no spit for the sky.

But yesterday, when Governor Sonny Purdue prayed for rain on the steps of a courthouse with three protestant ministers and two hundred participants (along with 20 protesters) I thought—the people in the Dust Bowl would say that God isn’t listening.  That any god of rain doesn’t reward people who have failed the land.  And it is a failure.

And it’s not that I don’t agree with prayer.  I do.  I’m a practicing Catholic so the tradition is part of the territory.  But prayer isn’t going to cut it, unless prayer can get a hurricane to form over Lake Lanier, which is now 17 feet below full.

It’s time for practical solutions, serious regulations, and above all, common sense.