Hat

She had been praying so long for rain to come.
Wilting under the glare of a punishing sun,
she took her eye off the ball, the first time that week.
A drop bounced off her head, trickled down her cheek,

an unexpected tear in the thick dust of the dry season.
Monochrome clouds rolled in fast across the sky,
and another raindrop hit her just above the eye –
it was time to find shelter from the coming storm

in an open space that was desolate and forlorn –
and there it was, caught up in the sand and weeds,
someone else’s old news, words she could not read,
to fold into a dunce’s hat to cover up her head.

Kim M. Russell, 20th August 2025

Image found on Pinterest

Over at What’s Going On? today, Mary asks us to write poems about hats: ‘a worn baseball cap, a silk scarf, a headband, a wool beanie pulled low, a wide-brimmed hat casting shadows, or any other piece that sits on the head’.

I don’t really have any hats like that, so I have dusted off and updated a poem about a newspaper hat, which was published by Visual Verse at the end of 2020.

15 thoughts on “Hat”

  1. A newsprint hat – how clever! I hope those early raindrops were followed by many more – the world is dry and thirsty these days in so many places.

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  6. Love the description of the drops and storm coming. As children we always folded these hats out of newspapers. I never heard of the word dunce’s hat and found out that they were used for discipline for kids who were disruptive or were considered slow in learning. Never knew. Luckily a lot has changed

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