This year, something in the smell of rain
brings to mind the nature of the light
without which you marauded that terrain,
each breath of yours an impulse of cordite,
your voice a chord that would not echo.
Though I catch myself still listening, tonight,
as though you might yet enter this tableau,
a raindrop palpitating the calm of still water.
I ache with memory blunt as an arrow.
Come without your weapons of slaughter.
The rock of my heart, igneous with pain,
softens to clay, calls for its poet, its potter.
And if it be your will to come here again,
return in deluge, submerge this floodplain.
Sharanya Manivannan
Dr. Hurley's Snake-Oil Cure 
2 Comments