There will come soft rains

Sara Teasdale

There will come soft rains and the
smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

She is right, you know.

I woke up, ready to read and work through another piece. Respond to a poem. Sara took the wind out of my sails on this. For all the words we fling at something like war, the earth doesn’t care. Neither does the universe, it is a social creation, for our own means. If we stopped singing songs, telling stories and writing poetry, the battles we fight would be forgotten.

Something about what we are though, we would still fight, that is how we are wired to challenge one another, and ourselves. And our leaders, tend to not participate in the literary traditions that are often framed as a warning.

Photo by Tiago Ferreira on Unsplash