Hope the Gods Won’t Notice
Mar 1 2010


We don’t talk much, here.
The weather, the game
the price of tomatoes.
Hard and tasteless, this time of year.
More of the same,
home-team lost, again.

We scan the horizon, hoping for snow
in this clear cold winter,
septic beds frozen
wells pumped dry.
Grass as stiff as straw
left over from fall,
a mat of limp brown leaves
under thin receding cover.
Drought, this spring
you can hear us mutter.

But we are a modest people,
and tend to believe
things even out.
We approve of stories
of squandered fortunes
of winners losing their house.
We believe in paying the price
for easy weather
a winning record,
tomatoes with bite.
So if not snow, then eventually rain,
replenishing the soil
recharging wells.

Yes, but all at once
we worry,
lost to run-off, flood
when the land’s still frozen hard.
So even though things even out
our hope is tempered by doubt —
that fate
will not favour us.

A good reason
not to talk too much —
go under the radar,
hope the gods won’t notice.
So that sooner or later
more snow will come,
a gentle rain
a steady thaw.



I like this image of taciturn modest people, living close to the land, and susceptible to superstition, as people can be who are dependent on fickle nature and the vicissitudes of weather. They believe that life is a zero sum game; that justice is served when the tall poppy is cut down to size; and are probably happier than their more ambitious and optimistic counterparts -- if only because of low expectations.

But this is also about this season of extremes: a cold dry winter, with hardly any snow cover. So the poem recounts exactly what’s been happening. And my own feeling that, in a world of zero sum games and regression to the mean, we’ll pay for this lovely steady thaw in the worst way: an unseasonable dump of heavy wet snow, or early spring rain, turning the unpaved roads to impassable gumbo, and the yard into a mud-pit. Of course, we need the precipitation for every reason imaginable; but still, an easy winter and an easy thaw have their advantages!

In choosing a title, I’ll often avoid using my favourite line: not wanting to steal my own thunder, I guess! But I love this line, and I think it’s the lynch-pin of the piece; so when you eventually get to it, having already read the title, it gains that much more resonance. Because there is some other stuff going on in the poem, and I don’t want any mistake that this is the heart of it: the linking of their taciturn nature and private suffering with their superstitious and fatalistic view of life.