Wednesday, April 23, 2008

It Finally Rained Hard in the City of Accra

It’d been threatening for many weeks now. The rain tumbled down on the City of Accra in the dead of the night. The pendulous switch between the suppressed, distant hum, the sharp, roof-top rap and the warm, enveloping drizzle hiss, strummed narco-notes on the strings of the reposing mind. It shoved wake-up time backwards, for rainy dawn is an enticing woman (or man :-)), and cloaked the breaking daylight in gloom from falsifying folds of gravid clouds.

The grief of the rain always clears the air, literally. I could see the nearly empty streets for many miles ahead . Very few people had braved the morning’s chilly mantle. My hands desired to stretch and touch the glittering life crystals that rendered vivid every colour, shape and sound. The breeze was crisp, and it hung lightly in open space, as the first kisses of golden rays were weakly blown by the cloud-concealed sun.

Central Accra rudely shouted “Good morning” with a shower of muck on my windscreen. Snapping out of my other world, I saw banks of mud, rushing rivulets, yawning composts of dead leaves and twigs, and filthy cars – flagrantly filthy cars. My febrile fear came true, when Joy FM confirmed that the City of Accra had suffered floods and damage in many of her thick and bulging parts.

But it’d been threatening for many weeks, really. The rain is beautiful, the rain is ugly, the rain is as where you are, in the City of Accra.

4 comments:

  1. You tried to make beauty and destruction co-exist. I saw the transition and it was not very smooth i.e. from where the muddy water hit your windshield. But I can understand why, coming to the damage caused by the rain, you could not be as smooth.

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  2. Well, it thought the "transition" between beauty and destruction was more sublty put, but you found it. I suffered the disability of not having seen the destruction myself. Relying on radio reports can be a straight jacket sometimes. Thanks for the critique(?) Criticism (?) :-)

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  3. id give a lot to have more rainy mornings. snuggling up is so much fun that way.

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  4. I'd like to say that too, Bentuma, but it would have to be a rainy weekend morning or a rainy week night, because the rain is no reason not to go to work :-)

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