Long as interminable threads, the long rain
endlessly through the grey day,
lines the green pane with her long threads of grey,
infinitely, the rain,
the long rain,
the rain.
Since last evening she’s frayed,
hanging with rags all sodden,
in a sky sombre and sullen.
Since last evening, she’s become unravelled,
patient and slow, down the lanes,
down the lanes and the alleyways,
endlessly.
For many a league,
from fields to suburbs,
along roads relentlessly bending,
grieving, sweating, smoking, they go by,
an outline of burial against the sky,
teams yoked, tarpaulins bulging;
down uniform ruts
parallel for such a length
they seem at night to reach the firmament,
water drips, down the long hours;
the trees weep and the homesteads,
dampened as they are by the long rain,
tenacious, undefined.
Rivers, through their rotten dykes
across the meadows seep away
where far off drifts the drowned hay;
the wind slaps walnut and alder;
sinister, waist-high in water,
huge black oxen bellow at a contorted sky.
Evening draws on, with her shadows,
burdening the copses and plains,
and forever the rain,
the long rain,
fine yet dense like soot.
The long rain,
the rain – its identical threads
and methodical fingernails
weave the garment,
stich by stitch, of deprivation,
for the houses and the folds
villages grey and old:
linen and rosaries of rags
that fray
along the upright posts;
blue dovecots fixed to roofs;
windows on whose sinister panes,
layers of paper blackish brown;
dwellings whose gutters quite uniform
make crosses on gables of stone;
windmills set, identical and dreary,
atop their mounds like horns;
Steeples and side chapels,
the rain,
the long rain,
all winter long murders them.
The rain,
the long rain, with its long grey threads,
its watery locks and wrinkled skin.
The long rain
of the old country,
languorous, everlasting!