A few days ago I savored three thunderstorms that graced the sky over Hanover on a single afternoon. It was sweet — the distant rumble, the uplifting leaves, the darkening horizon, the first drops wafting in on gusts of ozone.

I thought how much people in the Southwest would appreciate such a commonplace Northeast storm. Though summer had yet to arrive, wildfires in California had turned their skies pink and stinky, and Arizona broiled under triple-digit temperatures.

But the lightning of thunderstorms can ignite forest fires. How sad is that? People out west have to both crave and fear rain. It’s worse than sad. It’s torturous.

Could that happen here, I wondered? Could the regular rains stop, the trees die and dry and burn? Could the streams and brooks trickle down to nothing more than moisture under rocks and memories preserved at historical societies?

I recalled a quatrain from a Shakespeare sonnet:

O how shall summer’s honey breath hold out

against the wrackful siege of battering days,

when rocks impregnable are not so stout,

nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?

Are our rainy days numbered? Could be. A third of the country is under drought conditions this summer. That includes southern Florida and northern Maine, upstate New York and Appalachian Virginia, central Puerto Rico, most of Hawaii, and a vast stretch of Alaska.

Same goes for 85 percent of Mexico. In Canada, Manitoba and Saskatchewan have reached the stage of extreme drought.

Last year, Amazon tributaries were running dry. This year it’s record floods. But far south of the Amazon — São Paulo, even Argentina — it’s the driest it’s been in 111 years.

The Oglala aquifer under the North American breadbasket is dropping by two feet a year, rain replenishing only three inches. Farmers aren’t tapping last year’s rainwater. They’re tapping paleowater left by glaciers that melted more than 10,000 years ago.

Is New England becoming a literal oasis at the edge of a parched continent? If so, how long can it hold out? How long until America becomes a Sahara from sea to shining sea?

Ever the pessimist, I worry about the collapse of nature — not a total collapse but just enough to reduce the human population to a harmless minimum. Nature can solve its biggest problem with a tactical retreat.

A few years ago, not to be outdone by Shakespeare, I wrote a poem that started off like this:

One of these springs the daffodils

won’t melt the snow, the dead snow

will drool into iridescent mud, the fox

won’t come around to snatch my hens, no gnats,

no mouse-ear maple buds, no peepers in the dark, the breeze

putrid of whatever they use to embalm Spaghetti-O’s…

My poem, like Shakespeare’s, ultimately swung around to be about love. His, however, ended with “…my love may still shine bright,” whereas mine saw love wandering “like styrofoam in the desert of the dead.”

I’ll admit that’s a bit melodramatic, but the Bard and I (and Keats, Sandburg, Cummings, Burns, Wordsworth, Tennyson…) sensed a link between love and nature. So I wonder what will be left of love if we’re ever deprived of analogies with spring, roses, rain, groves, meadow larks and the honey-breath of summer.

Imagine love and poetry in a post-nature world:

Shall I compare thee to a can of carbonated fructose?

Thou art more lovely and more effervescent.

In you I see grove, rose and warbler oh-so comatose,

and your 401K sings hymns to your sweet investment…

Am I exaggerating or extrapolating? I don’t know. I don’t even know the difference. But the climactic trajectory does not bode well, and anyone who can’t see it isn’t looking.

New Englanders can still enjoy the pleasures of thunderstorms and brooks, but, well, here comes Shakespeare again:

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Glenn Alan Cheney is a writer, translator, pessimist and managing editor of New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@NLLibrarium.com.