By Azalekor Selasi
In the city where rain forgot its own name,
an old archivist walked the alleys with jars.
He caught droplets before they touched earth,
scribbled their histories in ledgers of moss.
Some drops belonged to centuries past—
a widow’s tears in Prague,
the sweat of a miner in Chile,
the melted sorrow of an Alpine glacier.
When he opened his jars,
the air quivered with memory:
a lullaby in Portuguese,
a gunshot in the desert,
a kiss pressed to a coffin’s lid.
The archivist never aged,
but his hands grew translucent,
as if rain had seeped into bone.
One evening,
I found him asleep by the fountain.
His jars unsealed,
their vapor rising like prayers unspoken.
I tried to close them,
but the rain fled skyward,
and the sky—
for the first time in decades—
wept.
