The prompt for Day 17 from napowrimo was to write an epistolary poem — a poem in the form of a letter.
‘… include at least 4 of the below in your poem:
1) a song lyric
2) a historical fact
3) an oddball adjective-noun combination (like red grass or loud silence)
4) a fruit
5) the name of a street in your neighbourhood
6) a measure of distance.’
Quite a challenge, I felt. Here is my response:
To British Weather
Today you are for me
And against me.
Raindrops keep falling on my head
You invite me to catch up
With things I
Should have done
Or
Could have done
But
Didn’t do.
An interruption, intrusion!
An amazing fact is that
Animals can
Rain from the sky,
Don’t ask me why,
I looked it up
To satisfy
A requirement,
A demand,
For a poetic challenge.
Another!
One hundred yards away
Is Crown East Lane,
Where you can buy
Soft, hand-made, fragrant leather gloves
Near the Church of St Thomas.
Here, at harvest time,
The children bring baskets of
Apples, pears,
Plums and damsons.
Anyway, weather,
Where were we
Before I so
Rudely interrupted me?
Oh yes, catching up with
The things
I should have,
Could have,
And didn’t
Do.
No chance of
Gardening,
Don’t want to
Get drowned.
You are for me
Drowning
In words,
You are
Against me
Gardening.
I listen and hear,
Raindrops keep falling on my head
Dribbling, scribbling
On the windows
Dripping, gripping
The brickwork,
Soaking, cloaking
The wooden, now wet and dark,
Garage door.
And inhale the freshness of moist drops – the scent of rain.
Polly Robinson © 2012
29/04/2012 at 10:08
Still raining here in South Yorkshire! Phew.
Love the lines: “Here, at harvest time,
The children bring baskets of
Apples, pears,
Plums and damsons.”
A lovely rainy poem, Polly!
29/04/2012 at 10:14
Eve, I think unwittingly your wonderful poem Men, Rain, Everything gave me inspiration for my epistolary to the British weather, so I’m putting a link to it here and will reblog it with acknowledgements too: http://everedwater.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/man-rain-everything/
Glad you like the harvest time bit – a contrast to the rain, I thought, as well as satisfying one of the wretched criteria I was writing to!
It’s really stormy here and the river is high and getting higher, dangerous in Worcester, we’ve had some dreadful floods in recent years. I’m told that part of the problem is the ground is so dry and hard that the water can’t penetrate.
Maybe they’ll raise the hosepipe ban? [heh-heh]
30/04/2012 at 13:55
I like this, Polly, especially the final section, and enjoyed your commentary (within the poem) on what you were writing.
30/04/2012 at 15:20
Hmmm, I’m quite partial to the last stanza too – wondered if the commentary ‘fit’ and glad to see you think it OK.
02/05/2012 at 02:28
Nice.
My husband is a meteorologist. . .
but we don’t like rain that much either.
02/05/2012 at 06:41
We have flooding in Worcestershire now and many parts of the UK are cut off, train transport is disrupted, we are officially in a drought, with a hosepipe ban, and it continues to rain. The floods will reach people’s houses soon. It’s beginning to look like the floods of 2000.
I think I’d like a job looking at clouds all day as I’m fairly practised at this now