By Sarah Spradlin

After the longest dry season,
you pour yourself into the cracks in the clay and your overflowing,
lasting long after the clouds have passed us by,
is the color green.
Hope, after so many days wondering when you might arrive,
that the days of the hunger season are numbered.
That tomorrow I will not ache from sowing in dry ground.
Announcing yourself with flashes of lightning,
perhaps it is the thunderous applause of the trees
as you sweep by them, the ground itself shakes in wonder.
You arrive:
sometimes sudden, violent, and angry,
sometimes slow, gentle, and kind.
Most times you are the friend who has my house key,
coming and going at all hours as you please—
resented, a little,
if you stay too long
and missed, a lot,
if you don’t come at all.
Desperate for you yet never able to break you,
a wild force of nature we may never fully understand,
you remind us how little control we have
over the rivers you carve into our streets and our fields:
the collection of millions and millions of little things finding themselves
together again
in hundreds of glassy mirrors that fill in the dips and depressions that many
feet have made.
You,
with that best-selling song you perform from the rooftops,
remind me that I am not alone.
That you will sweep away today’s mistakes and wash the streets clean,
that where the earth was empty, the green things will grow again.
There is relief from endless summer.
Petrichor greets me,
reminding me of the life that went on, goes on, will always be waiting
for you to arrive.
We have been waiting so long.
You have brought, are bringing, will always bring dead things back to life,
and as I watch you fall,
I believe in miracles again.

Sarah grew up in Georgia with her mom, dad, and little sister, Merry. She attended the University of Georgia, where she majored in International Affairs and Agriscience Environmental Systems. After graduating in 2019, Sarah took a job working alongside small-holder farmers in Chinandega, Nicaragua as a missionary with Amigos for Christ. She loves telling the story of the global farmer and nerding out about how nature works. Sarah has been homeschooled, private schooled, and public schooled, graduating from the Madison County High School in 2015. She lived in Costa Rica for seven months, and even hung out in Panama for a few days. She’ll read pretty much anything and has tried her hand at almost every kind of writing, though she likes poetry best. (Although fiction books are making a surprise, now-that-I’ve-graduated-from-college-I-have-time-to-read-again comeback.) But because writing bios is a struggle, if you really want to get to know Sarah, shove some words in her general direction on her Instagram, email her at sarah.beth.spradlin@gmail.com, or visit her blog.