MONSOON LESSONS

MONSOON LESSONS

After silence of drought, such speech.
From ephemeral alphabets traced in the mud
I'm learning the grammar of rain.
linguistics of flood.

But puddles are illegible
or too murky for strangers to read:
some message about pain
in the wet stammer of weed.

The sun declares the lesson over.
Hardly mastered. In dried ground
spelling crumbles. There remain
only punctuating buds around

what had been sentences. Next storm
I may learn to decipher earth's half
of cloud's thought, or fail again
to finish one fertile paragraph.



[first published in The Christian Science Monitor circa 1977 or 1988;
reprinted in Raking The Snow, Washington Writers Publishing House, copyright 1982 Elisavietta Ritchie; to be in Fresh Water anthology, Puddinghouse Press, 2000.]