Morning Showers

sky water wood earth
early morning elementals
broken plumbic thunderclouds
faint whiff of damp bark
and rain-softened soil

single jigsaw piece of sky

a stray ray of sunshine
silvers the rioting dill
pearled with raindrops
from the last smur*
sky water wood earth

Kim M. Russell, 2nd June 2020

Rain in Sepia

My response to dVerse Poets Pub Poetics: Rain, also linked to Poets and Storytellers United Writers’ Pantry

Sarah is back, posting from the south-west corner of England, where they have a lot of rain.

Sarah says she doesn’t usually think about rain very much at all, and I can concur that over the last few weeks we’ve had glorious sunshine, and hardly any rain at all. Not being used to extremes, we have no experience of severe droughts or monsoons, we just have occasional floods. As Sarah says, rain is an essential part of our local landscapes.

Sarah has shared poems about rain, one by a favourite poet of mine, Seamus Heaney, and another by Mary Oliver.

Tonight, Sarah wants rainy poems: city rain, desert rain, rain that falls in the forest, kissing rain-wet lips, rain on a bus window, drizzle, mizzle, a soft day, a raging storm, sad rain, happy rain, or the rain that comes as a relief.

*smur – Norfolk dialect word for drizzle.

70 thoughts on “Morning Showers”

  1. Oh, lovely, Kim. I should have known you’d find beauty in the rain. I love the preciousness of your semantic field in the last stanza – all that glistening and glimmering.

    I believe the weather changes tomorrow, but I don’t think it’s my fault for doing this prompt!

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  2. Kim, I always love it when you write poems about nature! Your descriptive skill is superb. I love “rioting dill pearled with raindrops” and oh yes, I love the smell of that spring/summer rain as it soaks into the earth. Ah….and how fun to have a bit of a lesson in the Nordic dialect! Love just saying that word! 🙂

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    1. Thank you so much, Lill! Sadly the dill was strimmed recently, but it will grow back. I have some in a little pot. I’m looking forward to a bit of smur tomorrow. Have you ever heard of a loke or a bishy barney bee? 😉

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  6. I like how you laid out the poem, including beginning and ending with the same line. My favorite part, which is such a lively visual:
    “a stray ray of sunshine
    silvers the rioting dill”

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  14. two new words- plumbic amd smur – both exciting and rather onomatopoeic. Thanks Kim. Really liked the repetition of first and last elementals – speaks tio the seasonal nature of the garden my fav was:
    “silvers the rioting dill”

    Dill does love to bolt!

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  18. Lovely descriptions–the faint scent of the wet bark, the silvering and glistening– and I liked the repetition of the first line–an emphasizing of elements and nature. I didn’t know “plumbic,” so thank you for that! 😀

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  21. We should always admire nature at work to witness the beauty of the seasons, which do their job regardless of of humanity who still think it is all being done for them!

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  23. Thinking about the sky as a jigsaw puzzle, so hard to put together. And even the word jigsaw gets me. Love the line about dill.

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  24. This is absolutely gorgeous, Kim! I love; “a stray ray of sunshine silvers the rioting dill pearled with raindrops from the last smur.” 💝💝

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  27. This is a feast for the senses, Kim. I love the way you’ve shaped the scents, how your descriptive magic makes me think of parsley wearing bejeweled armor. And I love, love, love the symmetry of the beginning and ending mirroring each other.

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