Rain falls first, ancient, indifferent.
Then another sky opens,
and letters begin to fall
like seeds from burning libraries,
spores from the forests of language.
They come down slowly and keep coming,
drawn by more than one kind of gravity.
Time here runs in cycles:
at dawn the falling script grows clearer,
and in the dark the letters glow.
A touch holds the moment still,
stops the fall in mid-air,
catches a meaning before it dissolves.
The glyphs come from eleven alphabets,
scripts in which people have written love letters
and orders of exile.
Like rain, they feed the ground they fall on
and flood some of it.
Some letters land and some dissolve,
with no ceremony either way.