A Rainy Sunday

This is a photo Captain B took on the rainy Sunday of our balcony geraniums blossoming away.  They are both beautiful and tough.

I was thankful for a rainy Sunday as Captain B decided it was not the weather to go a'detectoring in and so was available to chauffeur me to the Kingdom Hall - and he had got lunch ready too! It rained on Monday as well, and there was flooding in Brighton, so I looked up some rain poems and this one kind of stopped me in my tracks:

Rain
Raymond Carver

Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgiveable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

https://readalittlepoetry.com/2012/12/13/rain-by-raymond-carver/


How much the poet wants more life, wants to live, not die - in spite of the tragedy we are living in.  He knows how wonderful the gift of life is.

My own poem, were I able to write it, would express the same longing to live, not die - to go on living - with one important exception.  I can truthfully say that if someone was able to offer me a magic pill that would make me young again, return me to my twenties. I would only take it on the assurance that I could go back knowing then what I know now. Otherwise, I will stay here, balanced precariously at the crumbling edge of what Philip Larkin called a "huge and birdless silence". 

I do not want to make the same mistakes over again. And what i have learnt in the last seventy plus years is so valuable. I do not want to have missed out on meeting Captain Butterfly, and above all to have found my Creator and to have been taught by his congregation for the last 30 years are things I never want to lose.  So I want to become young again, be full of life again, but knowing all I know now, and having so much more to learn.

Which, in fact, is what the Bible promises us.