Boy Running in the Rain...

His face swinging from ear to ear
A bemused smile lighting up
His gander gait
Under the burlap mop

Who's looking at me
Why is everyone looking at my legs

His mother telling him to be back this summer
Before the green peacocks turn to Indian blue
Droplets big as his nightshade eyes bursting at each
swan step

Boy on an errand
The stealthy guilt-ridden leaves of the linden
Motionless in the metallic green boiling flood

Boy still running in the rain
How old am I
As old as the linden when it was eight
Where are the caterwauling magpies this day
None to mock me in my gait

He thinks he’s running in the still hot rain
But the cars and trucks along the road shower
In their mindless manic main

Wait till you see my master drive me proud
Over the bridges under high-voltaging cables
My throat loosening up in coughs and curses
The mud drained from my tired gables

Boy still keeps running in the rain

When will the summer end
When the cotton sky turns to lead

Or when the boy stops running in the rain

From: 
T. Wignesan




ABOUT THE POET ~
If I might be allowed to say so, I think my "first" love was poetry. Unfortunately for me, the British curricula at school did not put me in touch with the Metaphysical Poets, nor with the post-Georgian school. Almost all the school texts after World War II contained invariably Victorian narrative poems and some popular examples of Romantic poetry. I chanced upon a selection of T. S. Eliot's and Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and a little later on Pope's An Essay on Man and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. That did the trick. Yet, I regret not having taken to prose in earnest earlier than the publication of my first collection: Tracks of a Tramp (1961). There's nothing like trying your hand at all kinds of prose exercises to come to grips with poetry. Or rather to see how poetry makes for the essence of speech/Speech and makes you realise how it can communicate what prose cannot easily convey. I have managed to put together several collections of poems, but never actually sought to find homes for them in magazines, periodicals or anthologies. Apart from the one published book, some of my sporadic efforts may be sampled at http://www.stateless.freehosting.net/Collection of Poems.htm


Last updated July 05, 2016