I stepped outside to answer and rain / Beat my chest.
There is something about rain in Trinidad, sharp and sudden and sometimes fleeting.
Of course there is the smell, the petrichor of the collision of hot pitch and concrete with raindrops. Then there are the sounds - people scrambling when caught unawares; the inevitable declaration, if it is an otherwise sunny day, that “the devil and he wife mus be fighting”; the echo of rain drops on a galvanized roof; the low distant rumbling of thunder; the crash of lightning followed, not always but not infrequently, by the explosion of a power transformer and the hiss of electricity going out.
Or perhaps you are at a beach house in Mayaro, one close enough to the ocean that you can hear the waves and taste the sea salt. When the rain comes, if the water is warm enough or you’re ocean-deprived enough, you run into the sea and dive underwater and hold your breath as long as you can, feeling the sounds of the raindrops and the waves deep in your chest. And if it is not warm, or you have already spent the whole day in the water or on the sand, then you bundle up in a blanket knowing that the rain and the waves and the growling thunder will be the soundscape to your dreams.
Attribution:
Thunder called my name after midnight,
On a Sunday.
I stepped outside to answer and rain
Beat my chest.
Telling me
I. Am. Alive
— when thunder roll by midnight griot