Tag: rain

Jumping Puddles On The Moon

You are bright as

shop windows in the rain

a wooden ark that

so easily falls down

hard-shaped animals

rigid games

of words in squares with

values concomitant 

on the difficulty of meaning

I will lift you high

to careless shoulder blades

with a monkey-puzzle swing

your arms a python around my neck

knees almost a horse

jumping traffic-light puddles

shiver, smear, break like glass

one two three and stop

choking (only a little) 

on your glee’s foregone restraint

desperate as plastic

landing the way Armstrong did

in a world gone black and white

gum boots down

time dismayed

all the colours up

Rain & Fury

When you deafen
rain becomes
the walls of orchestra
tumbling in that
uncanny way
of bamboo and deforestation
brass and woodwind with
a thousand plectrum eyes
in the octopoid tangle
reaching for prayers with sparred
and upthrust arms
as if
in a lightning season
boats shed unwanted petal skins
bared, swayed sank or mired
but
between the secrets
of an eyelid’s flicker stillness
– an inadvertent claw
a few inviolate tears
never
exactly seeing

Your mother is a broad tin roof

The rain is your mother
when she’s angry


And when she sings
your sleepless night to sleep


The see-saw of the tin
A deflection

Against the hem of morning 
a familiar spill


The mottled face
against proud heat
a hand cool-ly calming


Her shadow
for a while, while you sleep


Keeps the rest at least
a blanket thick, and almost noiseless day




Until you’ve done
with the mewled noise
of your forgetting

Shout hail

Somewhere it rains
Somewhere you go out
In the first shreds of rain
Wreathed in ice-cream breath
Not here
Here you stay in
Until
After the lash
After the capsize threat
After the rimfire cadence snare
After
The ground and branches ricochet
In that frenetic St Vitas dance
Of tremolo ingrained
In the timpanic surface
Shout, hail
The rivers coalesce
Become trees
Again
Everyone steps outside
In the bruise-belly afterglow
In the broken, fever-pale wax
Solemnly righting bins and barrows
As if these were the remains
Of reliquary saints, or fallen cricketers
Resurrected to defend the crease
Of warfare green limned in wounds
Of white-stained efflorescence