Ash Wednesday

Severely cropped to show off the raindrops. (Larger is better.)


I've been reading T.S. Eliot in preparation for a Lenten class on his 'Four Quartets.' It inspired this sonnet, which I have been referring to as my Not-So-Great Litany.


“ASH WEDNESDAY: A THREE-UMBRELLA DAY”

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross....

Suffer me not to be separated

— from “Ash Wednesday” by T.S. Eliot

Umbrellas are a shifty bunch
despite their quality or cost.
Bought after breakfast, gone by lunch—
turned inside-out or swiftly lost.
In soggy Portland, where drops drip
upon the unjust and the just,
one’s caution doesn’t count a blip—
umbrellas soon go lost or bust.
Ash Wednesday brings a leaden sky,
a drenching rain, a river’s flood.
I hoist my broken brolly high
while trudging churchward through the mud.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust:
one brolly lost, and two gone bust.