Mark Scrivener Poetry Blog No 58 City Rain

CITY RAIN

This poem was originally written many years ago when I was working in the inner city of Sydney. I believe that the more people live in the artifice of great cities the less they realise how our physical life absolutely depends on nature's processes. Hence it is not easy for them to realise that, for example, changes in climate are far more important than economic issues. In this poem I got to use the adjective " peripatetic" for the first and so far last time. As I'm musing in the poem, I may, perhaps, be called a "strolling philosopher". 


 

                    CITY RAIN

A Chinese sage once spoke of this air's water as
tears wept by heaven for suffering man.
I, too, have seen the sky-pearls strung beneath a branch.

But these,
the luckless, urban raindrops shatter
upon impervious, black bitumen ;
drain through
the still waves of the gutter.
And here,
estranged from cyclic truth,
a peripatetic
and single citizen of
the city's dull umbrella state,
they seem mere inconvenience.

Flu-bound,
a black umbrella raised against the rain,
in the greyness it's hard to remember earth's gain.