Fragile Endurance

Long before dawn, when the world
was dark with lingering night
the heavens themselves screened
by layers of cloud heavy with their
burden and long after dusk when
the world, wearied by unending
rain that lashed the earth and all
its creatures when the dimmest
light revealed the world awash in
oceans of rain spilling nonstop
from the brimming clouds, thoughts
turned to Biblical-era fables of 
surviving the punishment of floods
and our very own experiences with
monsoon drenching, drowning
whatever cannot find shelter
from pummeling winds sweeping
the rain before it to penetrate every
conceivable vulnerability, dissolving
and destroying, humbling the shelters
that humanity in its conceit regards
as impermeable, a human-conceived
match contesting the destructive
power of nature's rumbling moods
in a disorder of the elements, brooding
and dangerous to existence. Yet in a
world of impermanence, no storm
system has yet proven its capacity
to linger interminably, and so it departed
and in the morning after, surviving
elements of the natural world made
their resistance known in a triumph
of fragility's capacity to endure.