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The poem 'The First Rain' reflects on themes of exile, loss, and the struggle for identity amidst cultural and personal turmoil. The speaker grapples with memories of a troubled childhood and the impact of violence on their homeland, while expressing a deep longing for connection and understanding. Ultimately, it conveys a sense of resilience in the face of despair, emphasizing the power of thought and memory despite physical and emotional scars.

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ishita4rmsilchar
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35 views3 pages

Adobe Scan 22 Aug 2025

The poem 'The First Rain' reflects on themes of exile, loss, and the struggle for identity amidst cultural and personal turmoil. The speaker grapples with memories of a troubled childhood and the impact of violence on their homeland, while expressing a deep longing for connection and understanding. Ultimately, it conveys a sense of resilience in the face of despair, emphasizing the power of thought and memory despite physical and emotional scars.

Uploaded by

ishita4rmsilchar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

The First Rain

The first rain like the first letter of May


brings news to the hills.
Perched like the houses on the edge of a cliff
I've lived more days in exile
than my poor childhood.
As a fumbling fifreen-year-old
Iabandoned my forward-looking native people
who entrusted terror, drugs and
a civilized plague to children.
Is it better to rejoice and forget
or to remember and be sad?
Only a foolish boy cannot wait to be a man,
adores winter, and leaves home to write poetry.
After the holocaust became a touchstone
it has become possible to convict a people
and make culture and murder co-exist.
IfItold you how babies have been shot down
from their mothers' breasts
youwould put it down toa poet's overworked heart
Robin S. Ngangom 45

but we like to believe in leaders who flock to the capital


only to fly back with spells as later-day sorcerers.
An animal threatened with extinction
needs a lair for his mate and his young,
>'m not different.
I need the morning for its bright blood
and I need to seize the night.
There was not a day that changed my days.
When I listen to hills
Ihear the voices of my faded life.
Whisky and Mehdi Hassan and Billie Holiday
make for strange fruit on nondescript evenings.
They can stop us but not our thoughts
from coming out into thestreets,
they can shoot us but cannot kill the air
which carries our voices.

Omy love you are still asleep


when the rain carries the night till dawn.
After lying down with dreams of you
Iawake in another day of bread and newspapers.
I'm banished to the last outpost of a dying empire
whose keepsakes have become the artefacts of the natives:
necklaces, pianos, lace and tombstones.
I've pursued horoscopes and
only promises and maledictions pursue me.
One day Venus was mine, joy and honey,
another day Saturn would not be propitiated.
Ifound a moment's peace
in my little daughter's face.
Before I met you
my dreams were limited by ignorance.
Sometimes at night
Iput two drops of our past in my eyes
but they refused to close.
Can poetry be smuggled like guns or drugs?
We've drawn our borders with blood.
Even to write in our mother tongue
46 Everywhere I Go

we cut open veins and our tongues


lick parchments with blood.
Iread my smuggled Neruda
and sometimes listen to the fading fiddles
and the mourning voices of my land.
I'm the anguish of slashed roots,
the fear of the homeless,
and the desperation of former kisses.
How much land does my enemy need?
Omy love why did you fade
into the obscurity of my life
and left me to look long at the mountain?
I'm the pain of slashed roots
and the last rain is already here.
IIlleave the cracked fields of my land
and its weeping pastures of daybreak.
Let wolves tear our beloved hills.
I'll leave the bamboo flowering
in the groves of my childhood.
Let rats gnaw at the supine map
of what was once my native land.

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