By Salil Chaturvedi
Rain Clouds
I've been waiting for the rain
For its tentative drumming on the tiled tympanum
of the house
And then a fulsome rhythm takes over
and sentences just run on
crashing into rivers, mountains, trees,
and boulders
Before plunging off the Anmod Ghat into a canyon
of the self
Whoever goes down so deep?
Not even poets
Only the insistent white sounds of waves
crashing on the shore
As a crescent moon gets closer and closer and a wind
starts blowing outside the text, ruffling the
afternoon feathers of golden orioles
There is pain
in their song, too,
if you are looking for it
I go out to look at the clouds
and am greeted by a wind carrying sweet
aromas of herbs, and spiced smells of women
who go easily from language to landscape
They know of no difference between
the arrangement of words on a page
and leaves on a plant
So they leave behind some seeds
And sometimes all some of them leave behind
are a bundle of poems.
It is for these that there is the rain.
anyone except me
like to having a small idea slink into
my head like a cat
and never leave
like to having the whole sky
turn a wispy gray-purple in the evening
and look at the green hills glowing
in the distance
like to running running running
full tilt and straight into
the Mhadei from the grass
on the sandy shore
like to being in the centre
of the big big big ball of sea gulls
going round and round at the mouth
of the Chapora river
like to be having something to do
that is small and smaller still
and makes no sense to anyone
except me.
Salil Chaturvedi is a writer and poet, whose short fiction and poetry have appeared in various journals, including the Indian Quarterly and Wasafiri. He is the Asia-region winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, 2008, and he won the Unisun/British Council Short Story Award in 2009. He also won the Wordweavers Poetry Contest in 2015. He brought out Shabduli (2015), the first audio book in Konkani for visually impaired people. His published collections of poetry include In the Sanctuary of a Poem (2017) and in Hindi, Ya Ra LaVa Sha Sa Ha, for which he was conferred the Hindi Seva Samman by the Hindi Academy, New Delhi.
The representation image is by Gabriele Diwald and is downloaded from unsplash.com.