A Waltz In The Rain
In 2015, I read about the refugees—
22 million souls adrift,
though it felt like more,
should have been more,
had to be more.

How can we even count
the broken, the displaced,
the ones digging graves in the rain
while the world scrolls past?

That morning, a desert cloud cracked open above my house—
another storm in Tucson.
I looked out the window
and saw their faces,
not in puddles or sky,
but in the hollow of my chest.
That’s when this waltz began.

A lady in a harbor once welcomed the tired and poor.
Now we lock our gates
and scream at the ocean:
“Stay away.”
The plaque at her feet rusts in silence.
The dream we sold ourselves
slips quietly through the cracks.

I’m older now.
I feel a cynical bone hardening in me—
one that whispers:
Why do you still expect better from humanity?
You’re late to the story,
4.5 billion years late,
and you think you can rewrite it?

But the poet in me rises,
stubborn as rain.
Why can’t we grow?
Why can’t we change?
Why must we always wage war
against each other,
against the earth,
against our own soft hearts?

The song still plays in my mind.
The question still rains down.
So I take a deep breath,
try some cracked acceptance—
and still,
somewhere beneath the noise,
I ask again:
Can’t we just grow?

The World Rains On You
I woke up this morning and there in my eyes
Outside my window a cloud starts to cry
So I wrote this waltz in the rain
To express my confusion and pain

As it rains
As it rains down on me
The world rains on you
So I try reaching through

There’s a lady in the harbor, a plaque at her feet
Find your huddled masses and bring them to me
But now we all scream stay away
There’s no room at the inn here today

As it rains
As it rains down on me
The world rains on you
So I try reaching through

I grew up with a phrase, the American way
It means something new here as the dream slips away
The poor huddled masses so brave
As refugees dig their own graves

And it rains
As it rains down on me
The world rains on you
So I try reaching through

I can’t understand how the world makes such pain
How can we reach what we know needs to change
Unless we can grow from the rain

As it rains
As it rains down on you
So I try reaching through
As the world rains on you

Maybe the best we can do
Is to start reaching through
As it rains
As it rains down on you