After the rain all will be better. The wasting dry throats and wasting thin arms, The wasting brown fields and wasting children in harm. The wasting sad world, spreading thin on this rock, Afloat in the stars, cold and glittering, they mock. They mock the sad mother as she hugs close her child, Too thin from no food, crops wither, be-viled. Too thirsty from no water that seems doomed to fail, Abandoning them to grow desperate and frail. They mock the shamans in chapel, lab and church. Equivocating madly, begging, preaching, hopping lurch, That the rain will come, and replenish the land, That the gods, universe and fate will offer a hand. But in the mean time the people will still wither fall, And faulter, and waste, clamouring close to the river. Now no wetter than the wet of a dark city gutter after much rain, when drains funnel and sputter.