The Young Toad
By Brandon Shane
May 5, 2025
May 5, 2025
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My daughter stands in the rain,
not dancing or laughing, but still like tombstones or cadavers, and she sometimes joins the musical tick of droplets in soft tongues, playing dull stones like natural instruments, and during the deep yawn when stormy thunder strikes the lone yard tree surrounded first by dirt and then a field of grass, I pull her in and she drags a window open, the biggest in the house, and stares at the unfolding world. The neighbors who find her amid this meditation are often steeped in complaint, but little do they know that standing in the rain under clouds with enough water to begin the floods again, is a matter of understanding and connection before it is ever a dereliction of parenting. I have stood where the worms burrow and the coyotes have found their next meals, and enjoyed the existence of stone or barges, things that only move when they are being moved, and I have dug into the earth since childhood, now when she is asleep or tending to her education, but perhaps sometimes in the solitary night she has caught me among the garden followed my footsteps and found the magic in the periphery of effervescent things such as insects and howls something invading a bush followed by flapping wings. Sometimes she will catch a scent and know the flower before reading a single label or being told what it is, that is this life, knowing it before someone has told you, and very few people alive will tell you that, they would look upon her in the calm sea, their industriousness has made a maelstrom under the pulsating sky thinking she is burdened by poverty and lack of guidance, not knowing her spirit is being fed by the motion of things the sense of baptism before any chapel, and she will return when it is too much, do the adult things of drying and changing into warm clothing, but until then my daughter stands in the rain. |
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Brandon Shane is a poet and horticulturist, born in Yokosuka, Japan. You can see his work in trampset, The Chiron Review, The Argyle Literary Magazine, Berlin Literary Review, Acropolis Journal, Grim & Gilded, Heimat Review, among others. He graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in English.
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Author’s Note:
There is something indescribable about standing in the rain, whether on concrete or grass. The closest explanation is Federico García Lorca’s description of Duende, as a mystical force and earthbound energy associated with passionate expression. It’s the dream we cannot recall but long for. Stand in the rain, savor the gusts, smell the trees and their variety, the forests far or near, hear the swollen clouds grumble, trust the dead druids as you look up and let the world quench your thirst. I find the magic we believe never existed is all around us, and the toads have known it.