Verbifying Rain

The recent rain is puddling
and the fields are tractored with mud.

Burst riverbanks leave us muddling
as we wrangle with the flood.

On the other side all moisture’s wrung out,
just an aridding cough of dust.

There’s not a sign of rainclouding, only doubt,
withering crops and hardened crust.

If we were able to cloudburst,
we would miss our sense of weathering,

the friendly grumbling about the first
conversationing that initiates togethering.

Kim M. Russell, 31st October 2023

Image by Xialong Wong on Unsplash

This Thursday at the dVerse Poets Pub, we are Meeting the Bar with Björn and exploring verbification.

Björn says that he thinks verbs are more interesting than nouns and adjectives, “but the dictionary is filled with nouns and adjectives that are just waiting to take action. Not only that, as verbs they may work even better as metaphors”.  He also says that verbs are more interesting if they are transitive rather than intransitive, i.e. they need an object to work on.

When we did this in previous prompts, it was obvious that verbification is not something that should be overdone. It’s better to choose a few strong nouns or adjectives and think how their verbification might be used as a metaphor.

Björn encourages us to bring out the dictionary and find nouns or adjectives that may turn our poems from descriptive to action-packed once they are verbified. I took an old poem from October 2023 about rain (something that is constantly on my mind at the moment) and played around with it.

24 thoughts on “Verbifying Rain”

  1. This is absolutely stellar writing here, Kim! I especially love;”If we were able to cloudburst, we would miss our sense of weathering.” Yes! ❤️❤️

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  4. I can almost hear Ian Anderson’s voice hear, your words set to Jethro Tull’s best. Superb entree, a verse really in contact with nature and our emotions…

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  7. This is fabulous farm-country verbing, Kim! “Tractored, muddling, weathering”…and of course, the “grumbling” when “togethering” made your poetic forecasting spot on!

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