Umbrella

I loved the rain
Once,
On the Saturday evening

I left my house
Throat sore from screaming
At my mother
And deaf to her cries.

Just as I thought I couldn’t hear anymore
I heard
The rain drop to its knees
Onto the broken pavement,

It lied there
With no words,
Only a reflection of me
Three years old in an ambulance,

The flashing red and my mother
Next to me as I lay inside,
The siren keeping awake-
It was raining then, too,

I think I was drowning,
I couldn’t hear when the tires screeched
And crashed into a lamp post;
The light dimmed, I felt the glass.

But that ending never happened,
And that rain was no longer breathing
Next to me;

It never stopped running.