RAIN

We live always with rain.

Soft rain. Hard, driving rain.
Rain which cools, annoys, drenches, surprises.
Unseasonable, untameable rain.

Rain that jabs down
with stiff fingers, provoking umbrellas;
rain you want to walk in,
holding your hands
to your hot face in relief.

Rain whose percussion
on the upturned palm of a leaf
is the sound of wings
flapping, ready to take off.

Rain a kind of music,
A kind of voice. Listening
to the sound it plays
lapping at the wondow,
you think – Rain –
in the language you speak
alone to yourself.

Rain that falls equally
on grass and concrete,
which lasts so many nights
your very dreams are of
rain, dark against grey stone,
the gravel drinking in
its intermittent poetry.

I remember footsteps
falling into place beside
the rhythm of water,
forming its own song
and singing of its own arrival.

Gift of rain. Summons of rain.
Rain everywhere, so common
it is tragic. Rain that we live
around, rain as pervasive
and invisible as love, rain
unlooked for, and never missed,
rain that we hide from
in glass and stone,
pretending life is elsewhere.

Rain the colour of ash,
that beats down like grief,
unkind rain at midnight
that slices the shape
of cold in the hearts
of servicemen on night patrol.

Rain that keeps us in our place,
tapping firmly on the flat tops
or our roofs to remind us
who we are.

The same rain
that used to soak my father
and grandfather, as they worked
the arduous streets,
and not the same.

Rain that will never make crops
grow, squandered rain, a
wealth of rain to bless the sprouted
heads of our buried dead.

Rain we forget has fallen freely
and will return without us
to the hovering sky.

Rain that we know will go on
long after we too dissolve
into figures of stone, row
                      upon row, a city of rain.

Alvin Pang

Published in City of Rain, a collection of poetry by Alvin Pang. Published by Ethos Books. 2003. http://www.ethosbooks.com.sg