Rainy Days = More Beatings

Poem

When it rained, it meant that Sir, yes, Sir (my step-dad), couldn’t work on his car.

The kids were loud, the house chaotic, home became a bar.

The first few drinks made everyone more chill.

Music played while we sang and danced … until that first shrill.

That horror film, ear-splitting survival cry that made the pets and children scatter,

domestic violence from 0-60 when it rained, that’s why this matters.

Dial 911, pray we’d all survive while waiting for the ambulance they’d send.

While everyone ran and hid, I’d stand in the corner, fists clenched, ready to defend.

Watching my mother fly through the air,

she’d land and cower in a corner, while over her back he’d break a chair.

Knowing my brother or dog was next, if they tried to save her,

I blocked their view, removed my glasses,

 tried to watch the blur.

With impaired vision, hearing can distort too.

Sirens in the distance, finally do— 

release that breath I’d been holding on to … then came the fainting.

Rescue, back then, was a surreal, impressionist painting.

Maybe that’s why I appreciate museums: feel safest around philosophy and art.

The rain brings the memories back to me, “I think, therefore I am,” reminds Descartes.

I know this to be true; and so with awareness, I “think” myself back to the now.

I pay attention to anyone who doesn’t stop after two drinks, I remember the Tao:

“The natural way of the universe” and Nietzsche’s “Eternal recurrence.”

Out of Munch’s Scream, I step into Monet’s Vétheuil, soleil couchant … transference

The dream, this amor fati (love of fate), will not be mine

I’ll embrace instead, the integration, while trusting life is by my design.

My body usually knows when it’s about to rain.

I feel it in my joints and head, this present new pain.

From the barometric pressure, is what I’ve been told,

but the body remembers every lie it’s been sold

Rainy days = more beatings.

©Sage Justice April 26, 2025. This concept/theory/poem is original to Sage Justice. If you use it, please give credit and link to original work. Thank you.

Poet’s Note: Please check on the people you know who drink too much, especially when it rains (or any inclement weather) when women and children are trapped inside with someone who can’t regulate their emotions.

Description for the visually impaired-Photo of Sage Justice, wearing poet’s black, holding eye glasses with her right hand, while her left hand puts her long, chocolate brown, waves of hair behind her left ear, as she looks off pensively in the distance at a church whose bells are ringing, soulfully. Sage sits in a wooden folding chair, outdoors, in front of a red brick stone castle near a patch of fragrant lavender, in France, at the Writers and Artists-in-Residence at Chateau d’Orquevaux.

Sage Justice is an award-winning playwright, poet, author, critically acclaimed performing artist, and intensely sincere, bold humanitarian activist.¹

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