Everyone Has a Wilting Point

You know things are dire
when temples get down
on their stony knees to pray,
when leaders stand in dehydrated
wells to fold hands and stare
at sky expecting it to tear open,
when women wait with empty
pots in streets for the water tanker
god to arrive. It is hard for a temple
to crouch. Harder still for leaders
to look sincere, especially when
they are men with melancholy
upper bodies which do not inspire
ideas of fertility. The reservoirs
are empty and the rivers are full
of shit and it would be easy to say
that the leaders too are empty
and full of shit, but let us assume
that they are as beautiful as temples
in their centuries of genuflection.
Let us assume their joints
are arthritic from all the grovelling
and they know what it means to fall
into the crack of earth and feel
its parched tongue slither across
their backs. Perhaps it reminds them
of their own tongues – how they went
from tongue-lickers to the tongue-licked.
Surely one of them will understand
how the history of political slobbering
is in fact a lesson in condensation,
how maybe what we need instead
is a mountain and two lovers
who have been set apart
so they can send messages
to each other through a cloud,
because if we are going to pray
to fill the furrows, why not
also pray for love, why not seal
the pockmarked ground by resting
against our wilting points and point
to sky and point to plough and recite
the hundred names of desire, so when
the rains decide to fall they will bring
a plenitude enough to quench this drought.