The ways of rain

          1.

A mother calls from a thousand miles
and tries to swallow her daughter whole through
the earpiece of a phone. Amidst the cacophony of frogs,
her silence is borrowed from trees as are the mauve
flowers that sprout regularly in her hair.    

         2.

I have never seen moss growing on words.
Dead branches, too, are alive in this rain.
For three months the forest comes up all around
and then disappears under your feet again.
This is a good time to plant the Moringa,
a woman’s best friend: you dig a hole, put a branch in
and let the darkness take over.

        3.

Trees may lie on the other side of language
but there is nothing wrong with standing in the rain to
recite a poem to a tree.

        4.

Childhood memories fall on your skin as silver drops
and in a short time you are completely soaked. Ripples
intersect each other all afternoon. At night the rain falls
at a slant, dragging you slowly to the memory
of your first kiss while the leaves nod knowingly
outside the window.

       5.

There must be a way to talk to everything
with faint outlines.
Some things survive only in the rain.

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Salil Chaturvedi
salilwheels@gmail.com