I screamed
no it ain’t
***
under the wind
there’s a little brook
that falls over a rainbow,
and the brook one day
asked the rainbow
why they kept letting her fall,
and the rainbow said
I thought you liked
tumbling down
to the clouds
and the green city streets
and laughing as you fell.
And the little brook said
no, dumb rainbow,
that’s not laughing,
that’s screaming,
and why would I
keep climbing back up here
if I wanted to be down there?
And the rainbow said,
cuz it’s part of the game? I don’t know,
why do you keep climbing up here
if you know you’re just going to fall down again?
Then the little brook
tumbled off the rainbow
so the conversation stopped
until the brook
climbed back up
the evaporation train.
Then the little brook huffed and puffed
and said
I keep coming up here
because I like
the look of the sun
without any clouds
in the way–
and I am trying to figure out
how to quit falling
but you and gravity
keep double-teaming me.
And the rainbow said,
without any clouds in the way?
You are clouds,
basically.
Until you
turn into a little brook
above the clouds
and ride my curving bow
for a little while.
I thought
you liked this.
And the little brook said
I mean, I do,
I’m grateful for you,
but it’s so much work to fall
then climb up here aga–
And the next time
the little brook
climbed above the clouds,
the rainbow
had become
a big hovering dish.
So the little brook
became a large puddle (or small lake)
and sat in the rainbow
watching the sun
and the stars.
And a few days or weeks or months later
they said,
this is sort of boring,
just sitting here.
I mean,
do you even move around,
or just float high above
the same patch of ground?
And the rainbow said
I don’t know how to move
as a circle.
Before,
I walked around with my rainbow legs
but now
I can barely budge.
And the little lake said
if you turn into a ball
I could squish to one side
and push us along.
And the rainbow was like,
I don’t think that’ll work,
I’m a floating rainbow above the clouds,
physics doesn’t really work for me.
And the little lake said
it does for me.
So the rainbow
became a rainbow ball,
and inside, the little lake
sloshed back and forth
and they rolled
up there in the sky,
but the little lake
tired out quickly
so they had to stop,
and they were still floating above
nearly the same green patch of ground
and yes
that’s the moral here:
the little lake got tired
because she spent so long
floating around
being lazy
instead of working out
her evaporation climbing muscles.
Obviously, that is the moral here.
And not the fact
that if she worked out her evaporation climbing muscles
that’d mean she was still falling off the rainbow
and the rainbow was still waltzing across the land,
and wouldn’t need the water
to roll her along.
So obviously the moral is
“don’t be lazy”
and isn’t about
needing something you used to have
even though when you had it, you didn’t need it
like you do now.
Obviously.
Jordyn Saelor 