DrBacchus' Journal

Storms

We stand here, high on the hill,
and watch the rains come
like an African monsoon
sweeping across the desiccated
plains, dry dusty barren.

So many of these storms
lately, we just watch it come,
resigned
to the deluge that we know
we can't run fast enough
to escape. Our sadness

washes around us, even
as the rain, so long in coming,
so feared and so anticipated,
soaks our upturned faces,
hides our tears.

All very cliché, of course,
which isn't to say it's not real,
just that it's universal.

No one gets to their heaven
without a fight.

And some never
get there at all,
though they fight, seemingly,
without a respite
while the storm rages.

Those of us who have found
it, by persistence or dumb luck,
may, now and then, offer
a brief shelter
to those who, so far, haven't.

Yesterday I drove past that place
I used to live,
on the way home to you.

I cowered behind that very window,
afraid
of the world outside,
afraid
that it wouldn't miss me,
that it wouldn't notice
that I had vanished behind that frame.

I watched, through that frame,
others living the life
I could not live,
because I was
afraid,
I knew not of what,

nor why I had been exiled
to this penitentiary
which I paid good money
to inhabit.

There, framed in that window,
another lonely soul
gazed out at me, wondering
if I saw as I went on my way,
past this refuge of those
too young to have lived,
and those done with it.

From the Weekend Wordsmith prompt, "That's What I Heard."

Morning At Olderkessi
March 14, 2008

The clatter from the kitchen wakens
me, but I don't open my eyes.
Not yet.

The acacia outside the window
claws gently at the pane,
a light scratching,
and the owl, who's been there
all night, whoo-whoos one more time,
and flaps noisily off to find
somewhere to sleep through the day.

A cough, off in the forest,
as a leopard drags her kill
up into the branches,
and the chilling almost-laugh
of the hyena that follows
her, hoping to steal
a mouthful.

A snatch of a tune from the kitchen,
the sound of frying bacon
and the glub glub of the percolator
producing that foul black tar
the grownups need to get them going.

I burrow down further into the dark
warm Raymond's blankets, listen
as the superb starling settles
on the parched grass, screams
"Come see! Come see! Come see!"
The ibis laughs mockingly,
telling its friends of this upstart.

Down at the creek, already,
the kangas slap on the rocks,
and the women begin the song
of their day's work.

Far, far away, the train whistles,
and the sun warms my face.

From Weekend Wordsmith

Sticks and Stones
March 14, 2008

All day we labored
with sticks and stones, to build
this edifice to our own ingenuity.
A boulder rolled there, and a few sticks
wedged in over here,
and the rushing stream became
a still, deep swimming hole.
Flushed by our success and exertions,
we floated on our backs,
watching the red-tailed kite,
so far up in the blue, we knew
him only by him cry.

He tore it down with a single word.
Our dam was making his cows thirsty.
The afternoon amusement
of four boys was causing a village
a great deal of discomfort.
What was, to us, a quiet place
to dip our toes, was their pantry,
and we had withheld the bounty
which was not ours.

All I wanted was another story.