42 Rain poems

Welcome, rain or tempest From yon airy powers, We have languished for them Many sultry hours, And earth is sick and wan, and pines with all her flowers. What have they been doing In the burning June? Riding with the genii? Visiting the moon? Or sleeping on the ice amid an arctic noon? Bring they with them jewels From the sunset lands? What are these they scatter With such lavish hands? There are no brighter gems in Raolconda’s sands. Pattering on the gravel, Dropping from the eaves, Glancing in the grass, and Tinkling on the leaves, They flash the liquid pearls as flung from fairy sieves. Meanwhile, unreluctant, Earth like Danae lies; Listen! is it fancy That beneath us sighs, As that warm lap receives the largesse of the skies? Jove, it is, descendeth In those crystal rills; And this world-wide tremor Is a pulse that thrills To a god’s life infused through veins of velvet hills. Wait, thou jealous sunshine, Break not on their bliss; Earth will blush in roses Many a day for this, And bend a brighter brow beneath thy burning kiss.

for donald justice Beyond the strings of water clinging to the windowpane, there were no cranes, just rain, a sky blurred by wet glass, a pond corrugated by raindrops, and, inside, the smell of naphthalene bars, a Victrola with a broken arm, a spotty daguerreotype, a dusty crinoline— O mildewed, seersucker suits draped over vacant chairs.

After Al-Sayyah The radio blares “Dialogue of Souls,” and the woman who hated clouds watches the sky. Where is the sea now? she asks. Where is it from here? What is its name?— this rain on a morning ride to school, winter, my seventh year, my father driving through rain, his eyes fixed on a world of credit and debt. On the radio, devotion to the lifter of harm from those who despair, knower of secrets with the knowledge of certainty. Not even the anguish of those years, the heavy traffic, cold and wind could have touched me. I was certain the palm holding me would be struck again. Chance allows for that and for stars to throb in reachable depths. Filled with grief bordering happiness, I didn’t care if I was safe, whether the storm was over, only that it came, the slash of lightning, the groaning sky, and the storms we made, how rain stripped everything of urgency, how to the lifter of harm rise those who despair.

When Eduard Raban, coming along the passage, walked into the open doorway, he saw that it was raining. It was not raining much. KAFKA, Wedding Preparations in the Country The concept is interesting: to see, as though reflected In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through Their own eyes. A digest of their correct impressions of Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your Ghostly transparent face. You in falbalas Of some distant but not too distant era, the cosmetics, The shoes perfectly pointed, drifting (how long you Have been drifting; how long I have too for that matter) Like a bottle-imp toward a surface which can never be approached, Never pierced through into the timeless energy of a present Which would have its own opinions on these matters, Are an epistemological snapshot of the processes That first mentioned your name at some crowded cocktail Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed) Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in And out of it. I want that information very much today, Can't have it, and this makes me angry. I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling Of dancing on a bridge. I shall at last see my complete face Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge. I shall keep to myself. I shall not repeat others' comments about me.

when it rains it pours the rain it raineth everyday pull up the reins, rayned in by reason, rule, and reverence if the aim is total abject embarrassment of shiny-looking objects tenderly gathered for the pome’s sunset quinceañera a star winked at me btwn the apricot and the cypress 2 crows atop them like a punter on the mizzenmast u better step up your game, havelok by what means of studye and devocyon what is love but a constellation of significances it liked to eat salmon w/ its fingers like a bear and then use those fingers to clean its glasses it cries and it looks like a wolf   I believe it wanted to cultivate this look

The rain is haunted; I had forgotten. My children are two hours abed And yet I rise Hearing behind the typing of the rain, Its abacus and digits, A voice calling me again, Softer, clearer. The kids lie buried under duvets, sound Asleep. It isn’t them I hear, it’s Something formless that fidgets Beyond the window’s benighted mirror, Where a negative develops, where reflection Holds up a glass of spirits. White noise Precipitates. Rain is a kind of recollection. Much has been shed, Hissing indignantly into the ground. It is the listening Belates, Haunted by these fingertaps and sighs Behind the beaded-curtain glistening, As though by choices that we didn’t make and never wanted, As though by the dead and misbegotten.

Lord, when you send the rain think about it, please, a little? Do not get carried away by the sound of falling water, the marvelous light on the falling water. I am beneath that water. It falls with great force and the light Blinds me to the light.

Now the god of rainy August hangs his mask among the city’s spires and balustrades and stone clocktowers half-effaced in clouds. On Park the first reflecting pool dims with a thousand smelted-silver circle-rims, while west on Fifth a modiste scatters leaves in fall vitrines, and felt-browed mannequins resign the world with gestures of disdain. Now in the Cloister’s high parterres the rain floods copper gutterings, boxwood, terraced urns and mottoes. “The weather turns.” Clamped to their pier, the smiling Gaul, the murderer Clotaire, and Isaiah, green-throned, water-cowled, exchange their fine-lit ironies for rotes of pain.

Mother rain, manifold, measureless, falling on fallow, on field and forest, on house-roof, low hovel, high tower, downwelling waters all-washing, wider than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster than countrysides, calming, recalling: return to us, teaching our troubled souls in your ceaseless descent to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root, to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the sea.

i early morning The rain, gray god with its huge hands has shredded the roses, and clapping, kept us up all night, the bridge washed out, the troll waiting to gobble a goat. How long has he been there, wet and cold, impatient, starving, his coat rent with welts and matted with mist? Father, thundering, his voice full of  bracken and leaves, leaves that in the autumn clogged the gutters.Who goes over the bridge? Who goes there?