Blackout
Photography: Amelia Badri
When the lights go off, and on, off-
again-on-again, and finally out,
tea light candles glow in every bedroom,
two in every washroom.
The quiet house listens to the rain’s
recital, its heavy drumming on the roof,
and the cracked windows wash in the
night’s jasmine perfume caught in the
small monsoon.
The settling storm has a hard time trying to
find its way in the darkness, too.
And the voices in the dim unearth each
other to tell stories of love and mischief,
trickster spiders
and quarrelsome Dutchmen.
The dying flashlight passes from hand to
hand to hand,
every eye is on the nocturnal narrator,
each mouth whirls spoons of vanilla
from the thawing carton.
The rain at last rests, but the pitch-blackness still leaks like ink into the late night,
and the silver shelled candles have already melted down to liquid wax.
They discover that the damp front step of the house makes for a fair observatory,
and when the children are all in bed, they huddle there together, whispering amateur constellation facts.
“The dying flashlight passes from hand to hand to hand,
every eye is on the nocturnal narrator,
”