While we stay in
When it rains it bores.
We lack the lustre to peer through
water-tinted windows
at a half-refracted world;
to dance and squelch in prayer to the sky,
where altar is tree stump
and sacrifice is sagging leaf,
back breaking under its own weight.
A tramp through mineral streams
and the legs of mossy giants
reveals sediment upon sediment of ancient wellies
and fossilised trainers,
brought to the surface after years of organic safety.
The owners will perhaps return in search
a day after the digression,
to waste hopeful minutes while footwear
puts its feet up.
But this,
this will stop even the most dedicated forager:
this monsoon that perhaps makes the shoulders hunch,
or the eyes squint.
That perhaps vandalises guttering,
or smothers the garden lights, which form ghosts
of Vietnamese stone lanterns
and are thwarted from above.
That perhaps waters our hanging baskets
which last-summer’s ladder failed to reach,
or quenches the thirst of rodents and insects
who battle Niagara while we sit
playing cards, oblivious.
by Doran Khamis
from Autumn Sky Poetry Number 6, June 2007
Leave a Reply