It had not rained in a while,
Not a torrent, nor a downpour nor a drizzle
It had not rained in a long while,
three thousand six hundred sixty seven days to be precise,
Though no one has been precise lately,
it’s the haze they said,
it’s the haze that induced the daze
The old counted time in the number of teeth they had lost,
The young thought of the children they have sacrificed.
They sang poems of the trees,
They told stories of the mighty rivers
To the children they were all fables
They joked that the old have lost their marbles
Why would water fall from the sky
What sorrow do the heavens have that they will cry
Why would the earth smell different when it’s wet
They have never seen the sand change its color
Only the senile can hallucinate of things in the sky
As if dark alien vessels don’t land but only try
Why would they have a name for it and call it cloud
The old don’t feel any shame when they say it out loud
They talk of thunder as if it were a thing
A battle up above you that you cant see, but only hear the ding
They were tired of their talk about the rivulets and streams
Of grown ups mouthing strange sounds they heard in their dreams
Their world was coming to an end and all the old did was look up
They wish they would just die, some day their heads would just pop
But they had waited enough, enough of their sighs and their prayers,
Enough of their rituals, their appeals to the gods,
And their wishing for some magic demon they called rain
One night, they came out of their tents
Dragged the old ones onto the rocks
And offed their heads
It seemed like a long night,
The night never really wore off before it was dark again
And, then a drop fell. And, they all looked up.
