Weather Conditions

The clouds were shaped

like bell towers with no bell—

outlining only the hollow

where echoes learn their shape.

Winds hurled themselves

against trees at the river’s edge,

armed with a cradle of paradox:

holding tight all that was vanishing.

My picnic basket scurried away,

a tiny ark of surrender.

The tide counted its hands

then pushed at the shoreline—

hands, too many to be mercy,

too few to be fate.

I studied obelisks, those stone spines

erected against forgetting,

each one a fossilized prayer,

each shadow a failed river.

I discovered that

when I am halved—

emptied of my own name,

I am rebuilt

by the quiet calculus of rain.

The streets become vaulted

with the equation of my footsteps.

Every alley a geometrical nave,

every puddle, a baptismal font.

The marsh exhales

through the cracked pavement—

sulfur and forgotten psalms.

Weather is the way

two strangers

recognise each other

without speaking.

Vinita Agrawal lives in Indore, India. She has authored six books of poetry and edited two anthologies on climate change. She is the recipient of the Jayanta Mahapatra National Award for Literature 2024, the Proverse Prize Hong Kong 2021, the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018, and the Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence, USA, 2015. She co-edits the Yearbook series of Indian Poetry in English. She was former Poetry Editor with Usawa Literary Review. She is on the Advisory Board of the Tagore Literary Prize. www.vinitawords.com.