A Present Day Babylon: Poet’s Conjectures on the Blood Rain Phenomenon

By Veidika Sen

They will write of blood rain,  

as it fell like dew, coating men  

in the cautionary of cool mornings  

they will speculate  

on the patchy blue soles of a god’s lotus feet trampling in the

heavens, cloudwatching too close, in thinning air, burning air,  

will wonder if the holes they punch in the sky with the waste of their progress and their

babylonian towers will send the weight of heaven  

plummeting to them, a salvation foretold and forewarned  

and forgotten again.  

The pavement will run red then,  

Wonder if your blood is potent enough to soak  

through concrete and bleed through to someone else’s sky  

for a poet to wonder about,  

Someone whose sky is the color of sand, and burning,  

of earth displaced and petrified  

Wonder if they hear the echoes of your trampling in the heavens, on lotus feet. 

if a poet under an newer morning, that has by then lost its chill,  

ponders  

whether bloody monsoons are words falling  

from the mouths of dying gods or dying people,  

words that men of mud towers cannot understand