Tikkun - The Prophetic Jewish, Interfaith & Secular Voice to Heal and Transform the World

The Prophetic Jewish, Interfaith & Secular Voice to Heal and Transform the World

Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/before-rain/)

Before Rain

By Tom Sleigh | January 31, 2017

Illustration by Tania Advani | www.taniamaya.com

Whatever you do, there are rockets falling,

and after the rockets, smoke climbing

up through walls that are exploding.

Trees grow up where there once were people, weeds

take over beds of lettuces and coddled flowers,

uprearing mole hills unpopulate the fields.

The bricked-in hours of the human have all been knocked down.

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Source Citation

Tikkun 2017 Volume 32, Number 1: 71

About Tom Sleigh

Tom Sleigh is the author of eight books of poetry, including Army Cats, winner of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Space Walk which won the Kingsley Tufts Award. His new book, Station Zed, will appear from Graywolf Press early in 2015, to be followed in 2017 by New and Collected Poems. He has also published a book of essays, Interview With a Ghost, and a translation of Euripides' Herakles. Widely anthologized, his poems and prose appear in The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Yale Review, Threepenny, and other literary magazines, as well as The Best American Poetry, Best American Travel Writing, and The Pushcart Anthology. He has received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, a Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an Individual Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Fund, a Guggenheim grant, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among many others. He teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn.

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