into the night

Terra Firma

It’s interesting how the smell of rain, the sound of rain, even the way the spray of rain feels on the skin can bring about torrents of memories without warning.

What would it be like to be caught up in such passion again at this age? Would it be fulfilling? Or was it only as special as it was because of the time and the place that it happened?

(1)

caught in the act
by a sudden
downpour

Why do mountains weep?

This time of year, a peculiar kind of cloud forms on and around mountains. It is heavy and thick. It pulls itself over the peaks and drags itself through the valleys. It settles at their bases and expands upwards and outwards. Sometimes it even drifts in incongruous lifts that are somehow light enough to pull away from the denser looking masses it departs from.

Watching these clouds, I always find myself thinking, if sorrow could be given a physical shape, it would be this.

(2)

melancholy
consuming the valley
a blanket of fog

Rain

It was a rainy week, the first truly rainy week in a while. Amidst the steady drizzle, there were a number of thunderstorms, sometimes the thunder was deep and guttural, other times it came in sharp, sudden cracks. Listening closely to the various kinds of thunder, I felt like each sound was somehow tied its own type of moment in the past.

(3)

thunder clap …
memory of
a past slight

Cycles

Autumn tends to be a moody season filled with moments of joy and moments of somber. As with the seasons themselves, we go through cycles in our lives, and sometimes we find ourselves in the middle of situations that we’ve been in before, sometimes even with the same characters.

(4)

with each step
the leaves crunch
here we are again

When words fail us

The internet is full of posts describing the meaning of words from other languages that capture emotions we can only dance around in English. Being bi-lingual and having lived in a non-English speaking country for a number of years now, I often find myself thinking in my second language because it is easier to capture the immediacy of my surroundings (and the cultural differences) with it.

That said, there are still so many things that only just graze the edges of my periphery, leaving me wondering what it is that they are.

(5)

scent of the sea
I sense something
just out of reach

Childlike boredom

Is boredom something we grow out of, or is it something that only disappears during certain years of our lives, years when we are too busy, and/or too tired from being so busy to actually feel boredom?

While watching my kids struggle to pass a slow, drizzly day without screens, I can only slightly recall the boredom they must have felt.

(6)

counting raindrops
from morning till night
the length of a day

Echoes in the night

After rainstorms, there is a certain kind of quiet that settles in outside, especially at night. If you walk through this silence, occasionally you will hear a single drop of water, sometimes a raindrop, sometimes just rainfall that has gathered somewhere until a single drip needs to be released. And when that drip lands in the right place, the deep rich sound it makes, and the reverberations there after are exceptionally beautiful.

(7)

into the night
the echo of a raindrop
landing in the well

As always, thank you for reading.
All poems and images are original. If you have any comments, feedback, or suggestions, please feel free to share them.