Ode to November Rain

A respite from early snow, 
it pours from bruised clouds and makes the fields sodden.
Drumming against my windows,
I hear it in the garden,
washing away words that robins have trodden.  

It gushes in the gutters,
punishes the water butt ‘til it overflows. 
I listen as it mutters
rhymes I never wrote—
a refreshing respite from the silent snow.

Kim M. Russell, 27th November 2025

Image by Katherine Carlyon on Unsplash

Grace is our host for this Thursday’s Meeting the Bar at the dVerse Poets Pub, where we are writing lira, a stanza form of Italian origin, later adopted into Spanish poetry.

The name ‘lira’ comes from the final word of the first line of a poem by the 16th-century Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega, which Grace has shared in both Spanish and the English translation.

The lira has stanzas of five lines with a specific pattern of seven, eleven, seven, seven, and eleven syllables, and are rhymed often using only consonant rhyme (exact rhyme endings).   The most common rhyme scheme is aBabB, Our challenge is to write a lira in one or more stanzas, for which the theme is our choice, with bonus points for poems about November.

15 thoughts on “Ode to November Rain”

  1. Love the opening lines specially the strong imagery of bruised clouds and the sodden fields. That last line from each stanza lira, just drives it home. I prefer rain to the silent snow too though snow can be really beautiful (from a distance). I also love the sense of sounds from hearing and listening to it. A muse for our writing.

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