1.

“Mama,” my five-year-old calls from the back of the minivan, “can you make up a poem?”

“A poem?” I ask.

“Yes. A poem about words. A poem that rhymes.”

I look out the window. Well, crap. A rhyming poem about words? “It might take me awhile,” I say.

“That’s okay, Mama. Whenever you’re ready.”

I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready.

One evening out in the maize field, where we had been harvesting maize, breaking off the cobs and throwing them onto the ox-carts, to amuse myself, I spoke to the field laborers, who were mostly quite young, in Swaheli verse. There was no sense in the verse, it was made for the sake of the rhyme…

They…waited eagerly for the rhyme, and laughed at it when it came… They begged: “Speak again. Speak like rain.” Why they should feel verse to be like rain I do not know. It must have been, however, an expression of applause, since in Africa rain is always longed for and welcomed.

—Isak Dinesen

2.

Rain was always welcome, too, in central California where I grew up. Most years it rained maybe six inches.

But in April of my senior year of high school it rained as much in an afternoon as it normally rains in six months. After school, my sister and I went for a walk in our neighborhood and splashed in the water puddled in the gutters, kicking water on each other, stomping and jumping like two-year-olds. We came home soaked and laughing.

Slosh a galosh slosh a galosh
Slither and slather and glide
A puddle a jump a puddle a jump
A puddle a jump puddle splosh
A juddle a pump a luddle a dump a
Puddmuddle jump in and slide!

—Eve Merriam

3.

On rainy days my freshman year of college in Seattle, I wandered Queen Anne Hill. I imagined someone was watching me, admiring my melancholy brilliance as I walked for hours up hill and down dale, composing tragic stories in my head while the mizzle soaked through my dad’s old army jacket.

The wind has such a rainy sound
      Moaning through the town,
The sea has such a windy sound,—
     Will the ships go down?

The apples in the orchard
     Tumble from their tree.—
Oh will the ships go down, go down,
     In the windy sea?

—Christina Rosetti

4.

Rain is not all it’s cracked up to be. Especially when it rains for 90 straight days. That is the winter I decide I hate Seattle’s weather. But I’m married now, and my husband’s job is here, as is our community. So I endure the rainy days as best I can and wonder at that teenage girl who thought gray was such an appealing color.

This is my Hades, where I find
what the house has eaten.

 And Jessica was left with only

the raw, sheer, endless terror
of being alone in the world.

“We are alone, Jessica,” I say aloud;
the whole box of romances must go.

—Kathleen Norris

5.

“Jane,” I say after a very long while. “Will this do?” I recite my poem for her:

A noun is a word that is a person, place, or thing.
A verb is a word that lets you dance and sing.

Oh man, I think, this is really bad. But I plow ahead.

Adjectives say you have a pretty pink bow.
Adverbs tell if you’re going fast or slow.
Conjunctions are words like and and or
Prepositions tell you if it’s from or for.
A pronoun is a word like you or me.
And interjections shout, “Hooray! Yippee!”

Jane says, “I like it, Mama,” and I smile, relieved she’s satisfied. It’s not a tragic romance, to be sure. But it turns out even I can speak a little like rain.

Photo by {thus}, used under Creative Commons license via Flickr. Post by Kimberlee Conway Ireton, author of The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year

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