Whoever said the rain was merciful
Asked the mother in Peshawar
The grandpa in West Virginia
The woman’s case was the harder one
There were fatalities
A child a husband
A community lost
But the old man suffered too
The brick veneer inundated
Vital records precious mementos
The bric-a-brac of generations gone
Or worse
Still there in sodden indecency
And in the Horn of Africa
The wives the husbands the children
Wail aloud for a precious drop
While troops mass on the frontiers
There is no squaring of accounts
Mother Nature is cruel
But crueler still the man who rapes his Mother