How to Catch a Rainbow (the ephemeral as prompt)

For the past few days, poems have been pouring from me like rain from a cloud. Some are light and playful, others are dense with grief, and a few manage to be both of these things. I never imagined that I’d wish for a space in which to share more than 100 poems this year, but there you have it. I’ve been combing through them this morning, trying to decide which poem to share, and for some reason—or perhaps for no reason—I felt pulled to scroll farther back in my Word doc and offer you this one, written nearly two weeks ago while I was sitting in the airport, waiting for my flight home.

This is a light poem. It’s a playful one. Maybe it’s even straight up silly. It stands in contrast to the heavier poems I’ve shared in my last couple posts. I don’t believe we need to cleanse our palate after expressions of grief or outrage, but sometimes we probably do need to expand our palette and notice the other colors that sit alongside our emotion du jour. We’re meant—not in every moment, maybe not in every season, but certainly in the span of every life—to paint with all the colors.

So here’s a colorful offering . . .

How to Catch a Rainbow

In a cleft between
high hills of pillow basalt
a rainbow stretches
to its full expanse,
like a toddler,
brightly beaming,
see how big I am.

The big girl can’t be
more than 30 yards across,
and I’m nearly at the end—

I see my chance
to reach the pot of gold,
to take it in my hands.

I speed a mile a minute,
the rainbow’s tail just a lunge away,
always a lunge away,
wagging with glee on the 
bumper ahead.
I yip my envy
then realize
to a different eye,
the rainbow
is already mine.

I am chasing my tail.
But there’s a way
to catch it still,
to hold it forever
(though not with my hands). 

All I have to do is
stop racing,
sit down, and
pin it in place
with the force of
my presence
and the weight of
my ass.  
    

Photo by Harald Arlander on Unsplash

The Prompt

If you would like a prompt to play with today (you are always welcome to share off-prompt poems, too), then give this a try: notice what around you is ephemeral. One true answer to that question, of course, is that everything around you is ephemeral. But can you observe or feel this ephemerality more in certain moments or in relation to certain objects or experiences? What does it feel like in your body to connect with a sense of ephemerality or with an ephemeral object/being/experience? Is there something ephemeral that you find yourself chasing? What would it mean to catch that thing?

Dark, light, red, blue, gray—whatever hues you’re painting in today, I look forward to reading your poems!