Rain Inside

 

It is raining inside me

But you can’t see,

Clouds of words enter me

But you can’t see.

 

It always rains in Macondo,

Do you know?

A hundred years of solitude inside me,

Do  you know?

 

You come back from a holiday in Venice,

Too exhausted to enjoy the rains;

I stay quarantined in Oran,

Too exhausted to enjoy the rains.

 

The precipitation inside me

Dissolves my soul,

Distills my tears,

Dilates my heart,

Dilutes my orgasm;

You know, you see,

But you are too exhausted

Of all the rains, outside me.

 

****************

 

Damning the Sky

 

There’s no answer blowing in the wind,

Summer’s not the summer that has been,

It doesn’t even rain inside

Inside the night a mid-day sun,

Inside the day a darkened night,

Birds hide at dawn,

Chirps muffled in humidity,

On sweaty skin air sticks like memory.

Shahid says, “It rains as I write this,

Mad heart, be brave.”

I look around the parched land,

It is like nostalgia,

Nothing alive will sprout out,

In the desert of dead deeds

I can plough a furrow,

Plant seeds of tomorrow,

And wait for the missing rains.

Shahid, it doesn’t rain any more,

Mad heart, how brave can you still be?

Someone must have dammed the sky.

 

****************

 

By Bread Alone

 

A baker in the bakery

once hid a message

in my packet of brown bread.

At home when I unwrapped

those slices for breakfast,

I found nothing secreted.

I turned over the slices,

their dark brown margins

and their light brown centres.

There was nothing cryptic

inside the leavened spaces,

nothing I could have tasted.

So I ate it uninterpreted –

I don’t like spreading rumours

about our racial biases.