In this evocative poem, Vandana finds that rain-stricken souls find solace in the darkness. imagination, and a transformed world—an exclusive for Different Truths.
Incessant was the rain last night The sleepless Looked for stars to count In vain Sitting in bed We imagined how ugly The streets would be The toads and frogs Had broken free That moist earth All that pent-up heat The creepy crawlies Wanting to hobnob With us humans Their ways of cooling off The streetlamps flickered Another power outage at home How anxious were we To know If it was so Everywhere in the vicinity... Drawing comfort from the fact The neighbour’s home was as dark.
Picture design by Anumita Roy
Vandana Kumar is a French teacher, translator, Indie Film Producer, cinephile and poet in New Delhi, India. Her poems have been published in several national and international websites, literary journals, and anthologies of repute. Her cinema articles appear regularly in ‘Just-cinema’
and ‘The Daily Eye’. Her debut anthology of poems ‘Mannequin of Our Times’ was published in February 2023.The book has been awarded The Panorama International Book Award 2023.
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The story of a desolate individual under the auspices of the biblical theme of the big flood, or a quasi-apocalyptic vision… Also, the mythological-like story about Mother Earth, which is constantly drenched by moisture from the Heaven (the male principle), thanks to which the unity of Heaven and Earth is achieved, and finally enables fertility. Unity is born only out of the collision of opposites. The poet leads us through the stream of consciousness of the poetical subject and their imagination which is the final point of interpretation and fertilization of everything surrounding it. The lyrical subject imagines toads and frogs and other crawling creatures getting out of their dens and walking the streets on a rainy night. I believe frogs here are also symbols of transformation and maybe even reincarnation as that is what they embody in the Indian culture. So out of the dark night, a new dawn is born. This is a short story about human nature too. As long as we feel that our neighbor`s window is dark, we find our own window being being dark somehow more bearable.
Thanks for reading and discovering all those layers,Ana 😍