Poem: Trying Not to Be Too Sunny

"Trying Not To Be Too Sunny" arose from frustration! Literary journals often decline “nature poems,” seldom accept upbeat poems, and rarely allow references to religion unless poems place God or the church on a skewer. All of those “not’s” collided in this poem, like heat igniting a cool front on a summer day, before rising like laundry-steam in prayer. Did I think any of those thoughts as I actually wrote the poem? No, but as the lines and metaphors cleared, that’s what made sense to me.

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Trying Not To Be Too Sunny

by Mary Harwell Sayler

The wet cement of elephant skin

pours along an African plain,

building bulk like

those thunderheads in the sky.

I wish it’d rain.

The afternoon turns

monotone

with nothing much to do but

laundry – sheets and

towels ready to mop a sheet

of rain that does not come.

Washing, washing everywhere,

but no pachyderms

pour from that cloud – now as

heavy-laden as a load of unwashed

clothes or a basket of unsent prayers.