Rain introduces strangers,
abolishes borders.
The new carpenter arrived
in a downpour to fix
my broken stairs.
Standing beneath leaky eaves
he told me he'd once worked
in a Romanian cemetery,
listening to the sighs
of the dead, who harboured
fears and sorrows, loneliness,
clinging to hopes they'd not
be forgotten, their images
would be kept, not discarded
because the person no longer
existed. For they did exist.
Once he'd bought a girl lilies
from a gypsy boy at the grave-
yard gate. She flung them away
in disgust, claiming the dead
had sucked up all their fragrance:
'You stole them from a grave!'
When blossoms are placed on tombs
they lose their scent; the dead
have insatiable cravings for life's
perfumes. Later, the sexton's apprentice
realised the flowers must have been
filched from a slab by the boy
to be sold to the unsuspecting bereft.
Rain resurrects sense impressions,
phantom lilies littering broken steps,
murmurings of disconsolate souls
in a long-ago graveyard near Bucharest...