Droplet

Falling, in the bleak rain,
this uncertain weather,
under a barometer of sky
where altitude pressures air
where clouds in turmoil
twist fog around the sun,
an arc as fluid as time’s days,
time’s years as rounded
as the planet’s shoulder,
the empty horizon a shrug,
disquiet and disinterest
hunched beneath it.

A falling droplet
takes on the shape of movement,
elongated with particles of its travelling,
swirling dust and microbes,
the chemical remains of its journey
dissolved in the waters that bore it,
a rising current, an updraft,
invisible as vapour, as secret and as telling
as the jet-stream veering south or north,
a whipped serpent of atmosphere
above a condemnation of earth
with the sea’s smooth bell-jar titrating
the future’s outwash, calculating
the iridescence of oil
dancing like a reagent
on the surface.

Desert dust, atoms of metal,
heavy or light, coiled strands of DNA,
smithereens of life and death,
turn in the filtered sunlight,
through grey haze and  storm-mist,
refracted patterns of colour;
the teeth of rainbows,
mouths devouring hesitant weather,
bear witness to torrents slaking
the ground to flood it,
but every single drop feels
gravity’s gentleness
urge it to be water,
to make itself into ocean,
to lay itself down
on substance
and stone.

© BH, 2019

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Feels like time to get naturalistic again. Thought about rain. Drop by drop. Remembered how dust and microbes are carried across the world by rainclouds. Sometimes it has rained frogs, they tell me. Small ones, I suppose. Cats and dogs? An exaggeration.