I
The day father dies
The rain murmurs on glass
Through night and day,
Like apocalypse is today, now
It courses down the eaves at 3.30 a.m.
At 4.30 a.m. it’s still trickling
Thinly
Wetly
Damply
Hungrily
Silently.
We pause to look at the sky
And murmur, “It’ll never end.”
“The rain will take us as did father.”
We are wondering whether
The food will last
The oil will burn till midnight
Till we sleep the wearied sleep
Of wanderers of those days
When electricity slept in rich homes
Not brick hovels.
And in the morning
We wake up in a daze
To hear the rain still pounding
Pitting the stones
Drilling holes into roads
Fearing the worst
The swirling deaths
Washed out homes
That came calling on July 26
The day the skies wept.
II
Once there was a boy
Who, when a rainy symphony played,
With open book on knees,
And parents’ warm cares
Read “Paradise Lost,”
And dreamed of poetic fame
Lost in a haze of innocence
Unprepared
Docile
Ingenuous
Rebellious
Handsome
Ugly
Sensual
Unrefined
Uncouth.
“Will he ever survive this world?”
“Look at him, he is so silent.”
“Why is he so different?”
“How has he become thus?”
They ask.
III
The dream of trophy girls is now
The tattered cloth of a mendicant,
Stained and threadbare,
Threatening to rend
At the most delicate touch
As rain comes down
On hills and grey factory roofs
Marble monuments, their treasures plundered
And plastic coated glass
Reek of human enslavement
Nomenclature-ed
Numbered
Synergised
Compartmentalised
Ergonomised
Promoted
Demoted
Transferred
Filed
Forgotten.
The rain stopped
11.30 a.m.
Just as the pounding in the brain
Ceased.
Made tea
Drank cupful of heat
Satiated
Laid down to rest
Slept the tired sleep of the lazy
Woke worn out to rain pounding again
Rivulets on glass
Head aching from countless
Confusing dreams.
IV
One similar night of noir dreams
Death snatched father
It rained great floods that week
The rain came so thick
That the river changed course
Marooning the house
Father built
Our abode
Of parsimonious money
Made from the pain of my hunger
The house of our deprivation.
As the flotsam receded
Leaving the ground slushy
In the 1.30 p.m. rain
He was interred
At the family graveyard
After the priests
Chanted
Prayed
Sang
Mumbled to each other
Dropped mud on his coffin.
He must have heard
The thudding
Rain
On palm trees
The wind sighing in leaves
The susurration
Of tiny rivulets
Into his new abode,
Felt the wasting
Of a body
Dissipated
Drowned in grief
That no longer mattered
When the 11.30 p.m. lull had come.
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