Rain Dance
My mother puts on her royal attire,
to do the rain dance of a princess,
but her feet are chained,
for it no longer rains like before.
Years ago,
I watched mother dance—
her fingers plucking silvery petals of moonshine,
and dropping them on my sleepy eyelids,
while an insomniac sparrow flapped wings of love,
on fluorescent nights in a land of dreams.
We could hear father reciting distant poems
in his bedroom
His words stepped out
of the eased door and joined mother
in her dance with the moon.
Today, I stop mother,
in her attempt to dance,
under the dark sky of gunpowder smoke,
and in the company of drunk shadows
of dry eucalyptus trees swaying in mad winds,
and she resigns quietly.
An anonymous explosion breaks the silence,
mother wriggles her feet,
her heels grinding on burning earth :
then she looks at me with wet eyes and says—
Son, it thunders, let me dance; and
I see raindrops in her eyes.
But it no longer rains like before,
in the land where my mother lives.
By Ibohal Kshetrimayum