Today's Poem

POWER OF DELUGE

In April in the country after month

upon month of summer the air

changes: skies take on the milkiness

of the film on a blind man’s eyes.

 Suddenly there is not the welcome cool

of evening. In the night the air is chill

and mornings follow in a hazy fume.

Across the windstruck skyline suddenly

like the tail of a kite, raucous black

cockatoos fly screeching to the pine tops.

And children call them the ‘rain birds’.

 Where they have been you see holocausts

of torn twigs and ransacked cones

scattered on the silent earth beneath the pines.

And now at night you hear the hidden frogs

whooping their calls. They importune

the King of Frogs to unloose his great

pale belly distending with the winter rains.

Night after night they chant and chant

litanies in the gardens, in the fields.

And at last in the norwest, darkening the earth,

rises the shadowed bulk of their King!

As often times over the lowlands

of Sumeria or the Nile           

when that scent of rain at evening

has promised the rising flood,

the frogs redoubled their pleading chants;

and a patter of answering drops comes

on the powdery dust. Dry grass stoops,

the tree leaves quiver like moths,

then ranks of grey showers hammer the roofs;

I see dark rivulets run from the spouts this night.

Afterwards as the rain steadies

on the black glistening road,

the thankful white-robed crowds

of frogs advance out of swamp and ditch

to stand in the beam of our lights,

heads aloft to their awaited God-King.

Their faith, their great longing satisfied

just as our whizzing tyres

smack them down, as if they were pale leaves

pasted on the stones by rush of rain.

            © Glen Phillips, 1969.