Monsoon Lessons

After silence of drought, such speech.
From ephemeral alphabets traced in the mud
I'm learning the grammar of rain,
linguistics of flood.

But puddles are illegible
or too murky for strangers to read:
some message about pain
in the wet stammer of weed.

The sun declares the lesson over.
Hardly mastered. In dried ground
spelling crumbles. There remain
only punctuating buds around

what had been sentences. Next storm
I may learn to decipher earth's half
of cloud's thought, or fail again
to finish one fertile paragraph.

Copyright © 2004 Elisavietta Ritchie All rights reserved
from Fresh Water: Poems From the Rivers, Lakes, and Streams
Pudding House Publications
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission