Dry As a Bone

When the sun rises like a red rubber ball (thanks to the Beatles for that sparkling simile,) you can be pretty sure the day is going to be hot and dry.

We've had too many of those recently; the river is reduced to almost its lowest recorded level and brown is replacing green in the fields and pastures and woods.

I begin to think of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland -- a monster of a poem that I've always loved.

". . . If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water.
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water . . ."

{This is just one stanza from the whole 432 lines (plus several pages of footnotes) of the poem.}

Dry as a bone.