HYDERABAD: Slue sky. Nature’s canvas that with its starlit darkness, white heat and fluffy clouds has enchanted both mind and flesh from time immemorial. Change is what it is symbolic of with its various colours that drip inside words gushing out in full force from an artist’s brush or a poet’s pen.
And it is rain which is celebrated the most. Rain, with its drumming the tin-roofs, sluicing down window panes, resuscitating dry rivers, making flowers open their mouths and sip the drops – the montage that it creates can’t be better described than in the form of poetry, each line smelling of the petrichor the heavenly scent of wet earth releases after the water reaches the parched soil.
The dark clouded sky presses itself onto the sodden roofs, treetops that sway with winds laced with curtains of rain and in somewhere in deep forests peacocks dance evoking something indescribable both in the readers and bards. The search for that unknown feeling increases when one reads about rain while rain-sheets wrap cities, streets snugly and equally. And it’s not just drops, questions, too, shower from the skies. Sample this poem from India’s bard Tagore from his collection of poems ‘Gitanjali’:
“Clouds heap upon clouds and it darkens.
Ah, love, why dost thou let me
wait outside at the door all alone?”
The heart of a restless lover flutters for his beloved as it gets dark thanks to the puffy rain-filled clouds. The cool breeze invokes in him the longing for a secret rendezvous.
Not many love tales have had happy endings which the poets describe in best way possible by linking it to the rain. The rain then become a glass of wine, a river of grief. US-Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali describes the sense of grief over loss of love in his English ghazal. The poem begins with this couplet:
“What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?
But he has bought grief’s lottery, bought even the rain.”
He goes ahead and uses perfect rhyme and rhythm writing the next couplets that are on death, celebrations, longing and myriads ways life shows its face to a wordsmith, sometimes consuming him entirely so much so that even fire befriends rain. The cold cinders linger in a dingy corner where forgetfulness devours the existence, the darkness within and even its memories of rain. In the same ghazal, Shahid writes:
“After we died --That was it!-- God left us in the dark.
And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.”
Rain mirrors recesses of darkness lying deep within. British poet Edward Thomas portrays this gloominess by writing:
“Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.”
The poem above delves deep into solitude, lighting within deep flesh of heart candles that help rain-drops appear clearly while each one is a portrait of a different emotion. Together they sluice down villages among broken reeds searching for the self after having been discarded by love. This universal search then takes a metaphysical note that many poets identify their own beings with. For example read Afro-American poet Nayyirah Waheed incisive poem:
“expect sadness
like
you expect rain.
both,
cleanse you.”
She stitches together tears and rain, and in a style almost like Rumi talks about both being cleansers not just for the body but for the soul as well. Water, she argues, in another poem, calls for the water inside us and hence every living being longs for it to come rushing to them as if the water remembers them from an eternity. Perhaps this is best summed up in American author Toni Morrison’s lines containing the chiselled craft of poetry within their bellies:
“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”
And who can forget the famous American songwriter Bob Dylan’s song A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall:
“Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways
I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall…”
The revolutionary words in the poem set some mood for the war to rise in blood as renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once wrote in his poem ‘Under Seige’:
“If you are not rain, my love
Be tree
Sated with fertility, be tree
If you are not tree, my love
Be stone
Saturated with humidity, be stone
If you are not stone, my love
Be moon
In the dream of the beloved woman, be moon
[So spoke a woman
to her son at his funeral]”
In the heart-breaking lines he gives us a portraiture of the trauma that Palestine and its people are going through where map is a pulsating wound. The rain doesn’t stop here. More rains will come, more such poems will bloom.