Suddenly black skies carrying the stench of rot

had sent us locking our doors

and shutting off the world.

But let it be said— nature is the ultimate butcher,

its bloody cleaver sheathed in flowers and fur.

No one to blacken your name this time,

Almighty Father, tell us where it hurts

and we will show you an abstraction—

we, poor, unworthy stewards of your creation.

We have chopped down mountains

and forests for our steady supply of crosses

for our unending crises, the silver in our pockets

rendered useless, like the shopping carts snaking to nowhere

as black umbrellas swarm the cityscape. 
We have learned to ignore the little horrors

we inflict on ourselves daily—

Almighty father, spare us, the weary for what

we refuse to wear, for the last rasping sound

we refuse to make and the prayers we mouth

without conviction nor malice,

for the degrees of which we find it appropriate

to pester God, or to bury him along with

our earthly father whose essence is incoherence

and obsolescence, evoking only murderous mythology

from his own divinities, a warmer but less reassuring word,

like that stainless-steel table on which

the corpse is stretched out, covered in the light of candelabras,

sin peccado concivida floating off

our lips without the tyranny of understanding

tremolo of transmission more problematic

than our half-hearted Latin.
If pathogens are the world’s way of exercising hygiene,
then we warn our children—

Floods are God’s tears for our impenitent souls

Droughts are dress-rehearsals for hell
Until we find ourselves

robed in the thin brown coat of gratitude

and held airborne by wonder.

What we are saying, Almighty Father,

is that we have stopped measuring

the ballistics of rain.
May the winds spread our supplication

throughout the gasping gray cartographies. 
May the earth, after its glacial labors,

finally find rest through muddy avenues, drying rivers,

scorched rice fields

cathedrals that burn with silence, the dominance

of broken grass and defaced saints. 
These words we write on a white wall,

with a bloody finger.
We are alarmed by mosquitos buzzing in

from the undiscovered country

and television makes things less awkward.

We forget about the rats in the barns,

raw sewage in the grains
To which we say, there is absolutely no reason

to panic. 
It is here: the scent of the world

right before it is once again erased,
but the smell of humid soil is upon us.
We don’t know how it ends

but we know how every great story begins —
It begins with a single word and heavy rain.