The comfort of the rain

wordsout by godfrey rust
BREAKING THE CHAINS < 26 of 61 > < pentecost

Pentecost Sunday,
June Nineteen-Ninety,

and the world hasn’t yet
blown its fatal hole in the ozone layer.

Jesus is further delayed
for reasons not fully stated:

the extra nineteen hundred years
have left us time to study eschatology

and learn the meanings of The time is short
which Paul could not have known. Tonight

across the city in a thousand churches
hands will be raised

to a hundred thousand slightly different Gods,
and voices will call down the Spirit’s fire

as they called to Baal on Carmel,
but there is no Elijah, no Simon Peter,

no tongue of flame on the wet branches
in this almost empty park, only these last few children

who swing through arcs of gravity,
who spin on the axis of this roundabout

feeling the pull of nameless forces
and the comfort of the rain.