Poetry: John Updike, 'Rainbow'

Audio: Hear John Updike read this poem, recorded in 2000. (0:51) Also by John Updike: Doo-Wop (2007) Half Moon, Small Cloud (2006) Male Voices, From Below (2005) TV (2003) Recent fiction: The Apparition (2007) Varieties of Religious Experience (2002) Licks of Love in the Heart of the Cold War (1998)

originally published November 2000

Short storms make the best rainbows--
twenty minutes of inky wet, and then,
on the rinsed atmosphere's curved edge,
struck by the re-emergent sun
in impermanent and glorious coinage,
mint-fresh from infra-violet to ultra-red,
gigantic, ethereal, rooted in the sea
seen through it, dying a bell-buoy green,

it has appeared. And when it fades, today,
it leaves behind on the bay's flat glaze
a strange confetti of itself, bright dots
of pure, rekindled color, neon-clear.
What are we seeing? Lobster-pot markers,
speckling the brine with polychrome.

John Updike (1932-2009) was the author of more than fifty books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including the collections Endpoint (2009), Americana (2001), and Collected Poems 1953-1993. His poems and light verse appeared frequently in the Atlantic for more than forty years.