Falling Peacock in Rainstorm at Night
My tail of colored feathers
hangs matted
closed behind me
It weighs me down
In this wet darkness
I can neither
dance nor fly
This darkness
weighs me down
No one here
to see my splendor
My only company
the relentless rain
Together
we fall from the sky
toward the darkening wood
The leafy trees below
reach out to catch me
but cannot
Between their outstretched
limbs I travel
like a stone
The swallows
sitting safely in their nests
sleep the sleep of the oblivious
innocent
of cellular divisions
silent metastasis
Their oblivion weighs me down
Only the insomniac owl
watches ever alert
for the kill
My famous feathery tail-eyes
are folded inward
blind to possibility
I am falling falling away—
escaping at last
this monsoon sickness
sing me a raga spin
me a garland
oh earth
but do not yet welcome me
Show me the sun.
Copyright © 2016 by Margarita Boyers. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 30, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem is the first in a sequence of curing ragas, written during a period when my husband of forty years was very ill. The images are taken from 16th century Mughal Ragamala paintings that happened to be on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, where we were living at the time.”
—Margarita Boyers