Driving up the Dive ghat
I feel drawn
into the green beauty of it.
Weeks of rain have
Given a tropical lushness
Unimaginable
In the sere heat of May.
It is like this
Every year:
May cannot foretell October
October cannot remember May.
Each is complete in itself.
October is all green, all bountiful,
Swarming with life.
The air is thick with dragonflies,
With butterflies, with bees,
With birdsong, with the cool moistness
Of still more rain promised
Small streams seen only
In their season
Run down the rockface,
The stone glistening
Black and brown and gold
In fortuitous designs,
Natural mosaics
Fashioned only to express
creation’s joy
to exhilarate the eye.
The sun is benign: a welcome fleeting warmth.
May is the sun’s month, heat is its gift.
The farmers plough the soil deep
to let the heat into the earth.
The bullocks and their masters,
Cotton white, reflective, heat proof,
Pattern the dark fields.
For May has no colour:
The white sun bleaches
The crop stubble colourless,
The roadsides are white dust.
The trees are shadow dark
Mimicking the darker hills
The wind sweeps hot and dusty
Across the afternoon.
May has no sound:
Waves of heat,
Blanketing the fields
Like sheltering snow
Absorbs all sound
Save solitary, metallic
Bird or insect whirrs
That disappear into silence
Like the small sporadic clouds
into the white sky
This land has lived in these cycles
Of rain and dry and heat and cooling cloud
These many many millennia
And we, with the land,
Taking breath and exhaling
Like generations of trees
Taking root, flourishing,
Failing, falling
To rot, reseed
Return and root
And flower and fruit again
For heaven must pale compared
To this land and its earthborn gods
Whose names, revealed,
Give knowledge of our selves
Whose names,
Remembered or forgot,
Are finally
One with a land that,
Always changing,
Holds unchanging truths.
Patrick Redican 