Drought and crow, 4pm

This is the closest the crow

comes to singing: a scripted language,

written with a scratching pen, black tones

against a sky no longer recognizable

as blue. Against that fierce white glare

what can it voice, while here,

hunkered in the shade of a room

inside a tent of bricks

I ache for coolness

and reconstruct the smell of rain.

Outside in a sky the colour of ash

the crow opens its beak and

words with umlauts

arc, a conversation with the dust:

the memory -repeat -the memory

of rain.

Artlook, January 2005