August 7, 2020

with the southwest monsoons come sumatra squalls, lines of thunderstorms that form at night over the eponymous neighbour island, and come rushing across the straits of malacca, arriving in the pre-dawn hours and breaking over singapore, in paroxysms of rage and lashing wind. the late-night reader, in her bed, learns to love the savage sound, for the very violence implied, unrestrained, irresistible, pitiless.

in my mind, forests are falling like dominos.

(how does that macneice poem go, in which rain falls like a dropscene, breaking the blossoms of our overdated fancies?)

Clouds like falling masonry and lightning's lavish
Annunciation, the sword of the mad archangel
Flashed from the scabbard.

If only you would come and dare the crystal
Rampart of the rain and the bottomless moat of thunder,
If only now you would come I should be happy
Now if now only.

(from 'June Thunder')





 

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