Spiral Ascending

Somebody’s knocking

On the door I’m unlocking

As rain droplets drum overhead.

Who could be standing

On the edge of my landing

To wake me so early from bed?

The door opens wide,

And the stairwell is dyed

With a shadow of somebody waiting,

But that presence moved on,

Ever higher it’s gone

Toward the clouds and the storms they’re creating.

I follow its track

Never once looking back

Up the steps in a spiral ascending.

Upon reaching the top

On the roof, I stop,

Anointed by raindrops descending.

But no one is here,

Though I thought it was clear

That someone before me was leading.

I feel something around me.

Its essence confounds me,

Then it dissipates, slowly receding

Unknown and unseen as the storms disappear.

With the dawn comes the calm I’ve been needing.

 

My apartment in Nairobi is on the ninth and final floor of the building, and although there is an elevator, I often take the stairs up and down for the exercise. Nairobi is over a mile above sea level, and climbing up nine flights of stairs certainly gets the blood pumping. The stairway continues up after the ninth floor, ending on the roof, where a lot of people hang their laundry to dry. This poem is simply an imagined and somewhat magical event, in which I hear someone on the stairway, follow them to the roof, but then whoever it was is gone.