sun scorches the earth,
grass get dry and turn to dust,
rocks transmit their strength,
trees drench in illusory rains.

k-balachandran

drought

Jun 4, 2026

June 2026

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removed.--2658

Living in a really strange area of the world called the Palliser Triangle which literally turns into a desert every 40 years or so, this one really spoke to me and flooded me with memories. I was a child during the last severe drought (it was during the 1980s) that lasted a number of years, and it was almost biblical, plagues of grasshoppers and all. The first line brought images of the soil drying out so much after years with no rain that it turns into solid chunks, and the land gets criss-crossed with fissures. Nothing green at all, like the second line, and the third, where the rocks seem like the only thing in creation unaffected, and like you wrote, their strength seems even relatively magnified just in comparison to how everything else is so devastated. But the last line is my favourite, it made me remember the desperation everywhere; the farmers losing everything to the banks, so many businesses in town shuttering up, everything just so filthy and covered in dust inside and out, where even the trees would hallucinate rain like a person thirsting to death see mirages of an oasis because their body and mind is screaming so loudly for water. 

I know I wrote a long reaction, but your poem brought back so many memories in a flash. I haven't even begun to try to see anything allegorical, though there is lots to explore there as well, with the drought perhaps being a drought of love, or hope, or peace, rather than one of water.

I think anyone who has lived through a sustained drought will really have this resonate with them. It is an awful thing, everything dying, and you have captured and distilled the essence of it so well.