Trudi Petersen
The coming Monsoon

You'd
Met
Before,
You and death,
In another life.
Burma you didn't speak of it.
Forty years and still the nightmares sweated you from sleep.
This time of year the worst. The barometer said fair but we felt it; pressure rising,
Atmosphere electrostatic. Monsoon season heat.
Gin with tonic, for the quinine.
Low mosquitoes buzz
Waiting for
The storm
To
Break.


Retrospectively written for my father for the year before his death in 1986. He served
in the Royal Air Force in, what was then called, Burma (now Myanmar) during World War two.
(He was a navigator in Mosquitoes). It affected him for the rest of his life.