Daughters of Rain 
 
after Mijoda Dajomi’s Rain-harvesting Hats

All summer the sun scorched the city
and the sky held back its tears.
Yesterday, in East London, a wildfire devoured nineteen homes,
while the capital’s parks burnt to dust.

Adrift in this drought,
we stood at the door between present and future,
the hinge of the twenty-first century
creaking with premonition.

There, we saw them,
the Daughters of Rain,
waiting for rainfall,
waiting for us to remember nature as our first mother.

Their rain-harvesting hats rose like dark wells,
deep vessels to catch rare drops,
beeswax-coated architecture
shielding their faces from wind and dust.

Maps of communities folded
in their jacket sleeves,
they moved like lay sisters
collecting, carrying and distributing water.

They knew the slow arithmetic of clouds,
the hidden movement of water underground,
how long a throat can wait
between droughts.

Protesting tyrants
who claimed the earth
as their property to possess,
the Daughters’ words cut across decades.

The heat of the evening surged
and watching them march,
we thought of our cracked riverbeds,
drained reservoirs, glaciers receding.

Grief and fear dried
our mouths and held us
at the doorway long
into the sweltering night

until dark clouds trembled
at the horizon’s lip,
a hand closed over the moon
and when the sky broke open,

we wept for the earth in the rain,
for the world we risk to lose

Lottie McCrindell is a poet, curator and the founder of TEXTUS. Her poetry has appeared in Magma, The Visual Poetry Times, AYFP, and Amurmur, among others.