Maison Horton discusses “On Drought”

Every year, Midwestern late-summers act out the same seasonal drama—the sun, the storms, the triumphant resurgence of green—but to me, Nebraskan late-summers in particular always come with an overwhelming feeling of closure. That closure is something I wanted to capture in “On Drought,” a poem that also deals with some themes I find myself returning to in my writing inheritance, time (especially transitions and endings), and nature’s omniscience. 

When I wrote the first draft of this poem, we’d had a particularly hot and sunny few weeks without much rain. The lethargy permeating both the people I knew and the landscape felt so heavy. Then I had thoughts about the Dust Bowl and how eternal those tribulations probably seemed at the time. To me, the connection between the past and the present here was far too apparent to ignore. When these droughts happen, I think it’s easy to pass them off as bad luck or to curse the weather, but times of drought have happened in every generation; in this way, none of us are truly removed from these natural cycles.

The speaker in “On Drought” ruminates on the idea that the land passes down its times of suffering like a gene, and so for the land, suffering is inevitable. It’s fate. The end of the poem sees the beginnings of a union between the defeated addressee and the “locust-trill,” an omen that preludes the land’s eventual (and on-schedule) move into autumn and winter. I look at “On Drought” and many of my poems as ways to explore cusps of great change, whether “cusp” means movements beyond personal thresholds or thresholds that natural cycles create. The poem is simply a means of crossing a boundary into the next cycle. That’s when the truth of a matter starts unraveling.