About the Powers of Nature

Another one outside the Gratitude Series.
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Little One

There goes the little one,
Wearing his crisply creased uniform,
His shoulders heavy with papery knowledge
His head bent, ringed in simple studious glasses,
His hair cropped by parental discipline.

And oh, it starts to rain, but
He doesn't run, he doesn't smile either,
He only lifts up his head;
The rain speckles his glasses
With tiny worlds of rare imagination,
The slush beneath his regulation shoes
Trips up his routine gait and becomes a canvas
For the big spirit inside the little one.
The water plays on his head, messing up in two seconds
Twenty minutes of a doting mother's toil.

A thousand rains later when the little one grows big,
When he makes big money in a big office,
Where the rain is never felt but only seen
Through the big, clear windows that show him
How far above the rest of the world he is,
In his perfectly conformist suit and haircut
That represent the freedom of adulthood
And the formal shoes that he chose to wear
Just like all his colleagues do,
Maybe then, it will rain...

...and perchance he will notice it, and maybe
The big spirit, now dwarfed by the big man
Will awake, and he will lean outside
And let the rain ruin his suit and tie
And his hair so carefully fortified against time;
He will wonder how the slush would feel
Beneath his formal shoes impeccably polished;
He will remove his contact lenses, he will find
His old glasses and hold them out until
The drops of dreams dance on them again;

Wearing them, he will look anew
At the rain-washed world that he'd have learnt
To look down upon and feel bigger than,
And remember how very big that world is
And how he
Is so, so little.
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