Rohit Nalluri

Winter ice
To Summer rain
To Autumn mist –
The year slowly melts.

The melting year melts my soul.
Winter heats it,
Summer wets it,
And the falling leaves of Fall
Breathe upon it.
I realize what it is I suffer
When the rains stop and the clouds migrate
To northern, luckier climes.

Cloudlessness.

It is my disease,
My sickness.
I am never homesick,
But for half a year
When the lands of sky
Turn to blue, scorched deserts,
I am Cloudsick.

The first symptoms of Cloudsickness
Is the sudden drying up of the well of my poetry.
I transform into a listless writer,
A rhythm-less poet –
My words run dry like
Chapped lips and rain-less rivers.
Words lose their color,
Their life, their fire.
And my soul falls silent,
Hiding
In its yearly hibernation,
Until the motion of the spinning Earth
Turns the year around on its head.
Leaves turn to gold
And crackle as they fall.
The crackling leaves
Faintly remind me of
Far, distant rainfall.
The skies are still baked
A brilliant blue
Like old, delicate porcelain.
But a rumor of clouds in
Bird-tongue,
In the song of dawn –
I begin to hear them all.

I sense the clouds approaching,
And my soul starts re-appearing
From its Cloudsick hibernation.
And just like that one day I awake to a muted Sun.
I wake up to gunmetal sky –
To a different color of the sky!
That the sky could be
Anything but blue
Is a revelation –
Memory & Surprise
Rolled into one!

Now my soul stands again
In the shade of clouds.
Under clouds
My feelings translate
Easily
Into poetry,
And under clouds
My words have
Music
In them.

Cloud-washed and
Cloud-soaked I
Smell of Rain
Again.

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