“On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday.”
- Gabriele Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”
A spot on the wooden door swells
How do I want to represent it?
I killed a tunnel of termites one night.
The next, they were busy trying to break out
through a tiny hole in the wall.
And now that the rain has brought
some of its dearer friends -
breathing wood, stinkbugs, molds and legit mushrooms
sprouting off of damp kitchen corners -
the doors do not creak, and I have more friends
from other, better worlds.
How do I want to represent them?
The other people are not very happy.
They make salary-cuts against fungal growth,
exhibit the grit, passion and sentiment of a farmer whose crops are destroyed
in the way they drive away alates at dusk
when the sky is singing with rain.
And so we close all doors, and windows, tape up the gaps -
“swollen wood!” we curse -
and fall to the ground with mops and wipers.
We light up the gas-stove in the dark and watch them burn.
At night the alates come in my dreams.
They speak like wood, and like rainwater -
they look like little clumps of mud flying.
They visit me in my hometown - and this is where I falter.
How do I represent them?
They are creatures of a sad lavender sky,
summoned by old bamboo groves as a derelict wind from the south-west
loses its way at sundown.
They come in swarms, a circus in town;
they ripple and fold like a sari hanging out to dry on a windy day -
they pick up the forlorn wind upon their wings
and corral it into epiphany.
Children come out into the streets to watch,
they pick up dying alates from the ground
and ask how come so many are dying -
when so many still are up there flying…
My dream is the colour of failure.
I kill its messengers in an opulent town;
I can no longer represent my roots.
It is pink, and orange, and blue and a little whim and melody of grief -
but it has a language, too.
I have lost the coordinates, friendships have changed frequencies.
And that show just does not air anymore.