By Salil Chaturvedi

Rain Clouds

I've been waiting for the rain
For its tentative drumming on the tiled tympanum
  of the house 
And then a fulsome rhythm takes over
      and sentences just run on 
 crashing into rivers, mountains, trees,
     and boulders  
Before plunging off the Anmod Ghat into a canyon 
of the self 
Whoever goes down so deep? 
Not even poets
Only the insistent white sounds of waves
   crashing on the shore
As a crescent moon gets closer and closer and a wind
   starts blowing outside the text, ruffling the
 afternoon feathers of golden orioles
There is pain 
  in their song, too,
    if you are looking for it
I go out to look at the clouds
  and am greeted by a wind carrying sweet
  aromas of herbs, and spiced smells of women
 who go easily from language to landscape
They know of no difference between
     the arrangement of words on a page
and leaves on a plant
So they leave behind some seeds
And sometimes all some of them leave behind
    are a bundle of poems.
It is for these that there is the rain.

anyone except me

like to having a small idea slink into 
my head like a cat
              and never leave

 like to having the whole sky
turn a wispy gray-purple in the evening
 and look at the green hills glowing 
              in the distance

like to running running running
 full tilt and straight into
 the Mhadei from the grass 
              on the sandy shore

like to being in the centre
of the big big big ball of sea gulls
   going round and round at the mouth 
            of the Chapora river  

like to be having something to do
that is small and smaller still 
  and makes no sense to anyone 
              except me.

Salil Chaturvedi is a writer and poet, whose short fiction and poetry have appeared in various journals, including the Indian Quarterly and Wasafiri. He is the Asia-region winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, 2008, and he won the Unisun/British Council Short Story Award in 2009. He also won the Wordweavers Poetry Contest in 2015. He brought out Shabduli (2015), the first audio book in Konkani for visually impaired people. His published collections of poetry include In the Sanctuary of a Poem (2017) and in Hindi, Ya Ra LaVa Sha Sa Ha, for which he was conferred the Hindi Seva Samman by the Hindi Academy, New Delhi.

The representation image is by Gabriele Diwald and is downloaded from unsplash.com.