Dr Shareefa Beegam PP teaches English Language and Literature at PSMO College, in Tirurangadi where the renaissance of Kerala Muslim women found its suitable abode. She got her postgraduation from Farook College, the Centre of educational excellence in Malabar, South India. She published her first collection of poetry River Signs in 2023. Her doctoral thesis is on the traumatic identity of women in the recent fiction from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Shareefa Beegam PP

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In Memory of Rain

The first rain of any season conjures up in me,
Not the miraculous petrichor emanating from the earth,
Not the romantic first rain love lines of poets,
But of those midnights when we,
Sleeplessly run helter and skelter
Groping in the darkness with lightning amidst,
Fetching pitchers' unseen and unheard of
Rushing out to find the rain dashing on the terrace
Pitchers kept at each corner,
Collecting waters, Wonderful harvesting on its own.
Drought has reminded us to collect the scent of rain,
In pitchers and bottles; small and big
Water collected,
To wash the plates, do the laundry, bathe, to survive.