Rain

Rain

Rain I remember; I remember how we 

slept under sounds of rain. The glory

of heaven, unfortunately, won't contain

what we have everywhere in spring: the rain.

 

I can remember how it lashed our windows,

and what a happy dream my sleep would kindle;

how deeply I would sleep--and on my arm

you dozed, light as a sparrow in the dark.

 

And how it ran and splashed along the gutter;

how beautifully, how lightly, we lived together!

Laughter-loving rain, sobbing out in gulps

--the Great Flood didn't scare us with its gulf.

 

So who's to blame that sterner times have fallen?

I still recall rain, spring rain in the poplar

and maple, sticky rains that briefly fix

a gilded pattern and, for us, a bliss.

 

Rain, blessed rain; hell, unfortunately,

will not have rain--wherever we're fated

to go at death, we will find winter, these

and all sounds canceled, stilled by total peace,

 

covered forever in black snow, in burning.

I remember rain, its coloratura,

high, million-stringed, incessant, moist,

long-suffering and magnanimous.

 

-Aleksandr Kushner (tr. Paul Graves and Carol Ueland)

 

It's been a rainy day here, though not spring. 

 

Aleksandr Kushner was born in 1936, in what was then Leningrad and is now St. Petersburg. His volume of Selected Poems came out in 1991 with Farrar, Strauss, Giroux. This poem is from the 1980-1987 section.

 

Is it fair to give this a political reading? I suppose so: for him and for us, "sterner times have fallen."