A visual representation of "Rain Scene" by Collier Nogues
YU Shuk Yi
Yan Chai Hospital Wong Wha San Secondary School
‘Rain Scene’ is a poem about a mother watching her daughter in a park on a rainy day, which is also the main focus of the painting. The top part of the artwork illustrates the mother’s memories expressed in light colours. The mother’s hair rises and transforms into memory of her father buying her milk during the flood when she was young. The turbulent flood contrasts with the tranquility of Lam Tsuen River and the downstream villages at the bottom, representing different stages of the mother’s life. In the middle of the artwork, the shelter and the shell of a snail symbolise the protection of our family. The outer city protects the mother and she in turn protects the daughter, echoing the themes of acceptance and inclusion throughout the poem. The anchor and the bright light in the centre represent the daughter’s role as a spiritual shelter for the mother. The mother will still stay joyful even though it is rainy and stormy outside due to the presence of her daughter. At the upper right corner of the painting, the parents of the mother are illustrated. They are watching their daughter from heaven while she is watching her daughter playing. It depicts the bonding and protection among the three generations, which is the message I want to convey through this artwork. Even though we may face numerous obstacles and difficulties in life, our family are always there to support us and they will always be our shelter.
Rain Scene
for Opal, and for Hong Kong, the city she’ll grow up in
Sheltered by the white-tiled park overhang,
I watch you run in nonstop loops. You’ve found
a shallow soup-bowl where a tree was planted once
but didn’t take. Its surviving neighbor trees, each
in their own soup, quiver in the light rain
while you stomp, soaking the socks I’ll soak again
tonight to leach from them their rust-red mud.
Of course I remember the pleasure this is.
This isn’t the color my mud was. Mine
was white, limestone ground down to river clay
and rife with flint and fossils. At every flood
we found dead things risen with the water.
In case the road washed out we had the truck,
and when the creek rose past truck-axle-height,
my father drove the tractor to the highway
and hitched a ride to get more milk.
More milk here takes merely a walk
down to the Circle K, whose clerk knows you
and says hello. Hello you say to her, or if she says
jóu sàhn, you say jóu sàhn. Jóu sàhn, says the fruit stand man
who offers you an orange. You take words in
and give them back, but sometimes changed: orange
becomes ocean–because of cháang, I think–
which in our family now describes both fruit and sea.
The sea comes very near the fruit stand, surging in
on Lam Tsuen River’s tide from Plover Cove,
but the watercourse is paved and engineered, no chance
of flood no matter how the rain comes down. My mother
would have liked that, would have liked the refuge
this city makes, the care its people take to greet
each other. Thank you for the ocean, you say to the man.
What she would have made of you, I wonder.
I wonder where her heaven is. Far from my father’s,
surely. Or near, in that for both of them, just as for me,
you are every heaven’s anchor. I am glad we’ve anchored here,
where I watch you watching for snails, the giant ones
who come out in the rain, bigger than the ocean you’ve forgotten
in your awe, are those its hands you ask and no, I say,
they are a kind of eyes, a kind which can bear water.
Some creatures, even cities, make their own shelter.
Collier Nogues
The poem was first published on the Writing Plus website as part of the Urban Love Poetry Contest for the 2020 Hong Kong International Literary Festival Schools Programme:
https://www.writingplus.hk/urban-love-poem-2020, reprinted with the permission of the poet.