Rain

The people here stand and move on the ground. They are as small as they could be and their clothing is simple and pocketed and I want to call them farmers. Dirty faces, weathered hands, feet wrapped in hardened leather. Smaller and smaller they seem, their tasks performed and faces without emotion. They are of the Earth.

The stuff resembles a magnificent fungus, mushroom-like caps and stems and it sparkles. Little bits of blue and red. An abundance, and it is their food. I see one of them bend to it and then hand to mouth. His hand dips into one of the pouches tied to his belt. The other one brimming with the stuff, he pulls from this one a shimmering handful of dust and lets it fall to the place whence came his meal. He moves on to another patch of food and takes it, pushing it deep into his swollen pouch. Dust fills in the gap. And again. And each of them doing the same.

The rain comes. It falls from the sky sparsely, but the drops are larger than seems natural. At once, the majority of the small people head in the same direction. Others shelter themselves as best they can and still others stop altogether and stand motionless.

The stuff shoots up out of the ground. Fountains of it and there is more than before. Into the air and then settled and ready. Wherever there is the dust, it is absorbed and changed and exploded.

And so are the people. I see them now as they are; as gathering mounds of the most precious and rare that cycle and cycle into something more than they ever could have been and then into nothing.