Rain

Not so hot as this for a hundred years.

You were where I was going. I was in tears.

I surrendered my heart to the judgement of my peers.

A century's heat in the garden, fierce as love.

You returned on the day I had to leave.

I mimed the full, rich, busy life i had to live.

Hotter than hell. I burned for you day and night;

got bits of your body wrong, bits of it right,

in the huge mouth of the dark, in the bite of the light.

I planted a rose, burnt orange, the colour of flame,

gave it the last of the water, gave it your name.

It flared back at the sun in a perfect rhyme.

Then the rain came, like stammered kisses at first

on the back of my neck. I unfurled my fist

for the rain to caress with its lips. I turned up my face,

and water flooded my mouth, baptised my head,

and the rainclouds gathered like midnight overhead,

and the rain came down like a lover comes to a bed.

Carol Ann Duffy

x

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