Intense Rain

Pounding rain, cold rain, flooding rain – it arrives with plenty of warning, with a feeling of inevitability, of doom. It tells us, ‘Yes, here is Winter.’ It travels all down the long east coast of Australia, even to my dear little birth island, so tiny it is sometimes left off the map. I am glad to be far north of there now, removed from that paralysing, deep-frost cold I once knew well. My body still remembers. I remember, too, through all these decades, the aftermath of rain in rural Tasmania: the particular pervasiveness of water dripping from leaves long after the deluge ceased. In this present downpour, everywhere floods – the whole coast, even that island. Here, in the warmer sub-tropics, in the small town where I live now, only the section near the river goes under. Up on my hill, just out of town, I barricade myself inside my cosy house and wait it out.

after the rain

one slow, constant drip –

heavy footsteps

Written for Haibun Monday: 50 Shades of Rain, at dVerse. (I realise belatedly that I was supposed to use the Japanese word for intense rain, shinotsukuame, as my title – but I've constructed this around using the English phrase, so it will have to stay.)