Rainmaker
By Wendy Hammond

She summons the rain, palms
raised, painting space with her body,
crayoned in blues and greys
as if she is animated,
the sky exaggerated beyond itself.
She runs barefoot, tanned
and wet, upsetting the thunder,
praising sparks of light against
final curtains.

Her chants, her wind-like callings
stir midnight into a vast whirlpool.
Light feet, and constant
fallings, she dances the fool of a rainmaker.
And the cries of her white dress
clinging to innocence, lessen.

Splashes of sin, of could-have-beens,
recoil and bend into oblivion.
Like a forgotten bed-sheet pinned to the clothesline
flaps and snaps in the breeze,
the stronger the wind, the harder the rain,
soon she is freed of sodden linen,
left naked in her pain.

Beginnings and endings
are one in the same, a bathing,
a flooding, eventually draining her.
So she angers the storm
with both arms extended, in a dance
with the dark, the lightening flashes,
the sky and black patches
of ruin.

Exhaused of all she had left to give,
all she had left to be taken.
she lays down in the puddle of
forsaked dreams,
and beads of rain
swallow her.

Wendy Hammond lives in Michigan and works as a computer systems consultant. She is a published poet, including a collection entitled "95 Windows" available through bookstores nationally.