“Naked, alone, unsmiling, there she stood, / No cloud to raise her from the earth”

[larryhammer]

For Poetry Monday, another modern sonnet:


A Prayer for Rain, Leisl Mueller

Let it come down: these thicknesses of air
have long enough walled love away from love;
stillness has hardened until words despair
of their high leaps and kisses shut themselves
back into wishing. Crippled lovers lie
against a weather which holds out on them,
waiting, awaiting some shrill sign, some cry,
some screaming cat that smells a sacrifice
and spells them thunder. Start the mumbling lips,
syllable by monotonous syllable,
that wash away the sullen griefs of love
and drown out knowledge of an ancient war—
o, ill-willed dark, give with the sound of rain,
let love be brought to ignorance again.


I should run more Mueller here. She was born in 1924 in Hamburg, and her family fled Nazi Germany for the States 15 years later, where she remains today. Her poetry in English has won several awards including the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. This one's from 1964, FWIW.

---L.

Subject quote from The Earthly Paradise, "The Hill of Venus," William Morris.