Sumana Roy lives in Siliguri, a small town in sub-Himalayan Bengal.

Rain

Rain is your birthmark,
your drool,
your hamartia.
You were a Stupa.
I lacked courage.
I stayed on the ship.
I stood on the deck
and watched your
peace. Peace –
striped, thick and thin,
mossy. For who had last
touched peace?
What peace there is
in falling!
Lazy peace.
Peace is obedience,
the ancient call
of gravity.

Rain,
I only see you grow,
unbidden,
into a silver music,
into a skeleton of ruin.
Rain,
I long
to touch your toes,
to pull them outwards,
to crackle them,
to let my cousins hear
how I make love
to your slippery body.
Rain,
I sew myself
on to river floors
sometimes
and wait like a secret
resting on her elbow.
Rain,
let me nurse
your calluses,
let me tease
out your blackheads,
let me,
let me
bear you a child,
an inheritor of your soft fins.
Rain,
cover my throbbing veins tonight,
tell me
that your ancestor
wasn’t a pirate on a smudgy sky.
Rain,
tell me that I’m a thud
on your translucent skin.
Rain,
tell me that
I’m the lover
you lost last August,
that you’ve only come
to lick my blisters,
to collect the last word
I threw at you.
Rain, tell me
that all I want scrubbed
from the throat of my life,
you want to hold in your blood,
that you want my insomniac sighs
to slip between your fingers.
Rain,
tell me that you will come
to the stone fair with your dog.

We will make fever.