There I was again

writing urgently about the rain

There I was again
writing urgently about the rain
as if it would ever stop
or change somehow
into something ordinary
like brushing ones teeth
or filtering the cat litter through a slotted scoop.
Truth is, if you walk outside
and water falls from the sky
that's pretty amazing.
Or a breeze filled with petals
from the cherry tree on Eagle Run,
or once what sounded like hail
turned out to be thousands
of green caterpillars dropping
from the sky onto the fibreglass porch cover.
One long weekend in May a few years back
it was ash that fell,
covered everything and pretty much
ruined the summer. I read about a man
in Alaska driving along at night
when a moose fell from the sky
onto the road in front of his car.
Well it's not really falling though is it.
More like an elemental joining
of things above with the things already below.
Even light wants to be here
It clings to the raindrops looking for weight.
And if you walk outside
while water falls from the sky
and someone kisses you
that can be both amazing and elemental
and probably the cells of a thousand poems
will slough off and fall
to this extraordinary earth.

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One of the more daunting challenges faced by poets is the idea that anything we write has already been written uncountable times. So why write yet another poem about rain? Or the moon. Or bones, barns, magnolias, geese?

I asked chatGPT to guess how many poems have been written about rain. It didn’t want to reply but when I pressed the bot replied:

Taking an educated guess, considering the vast history of poetry, the numerous languages and cultures, and the ubiquity of rain as a topic, there could easily be hundreds of thousands to millions of poems about rain.

“There I was again” was first published in Dunes Review, Vol 13, Issue 1. Summer 2008. Ten years later, I entered it into a poetry contest with the Royal City Literary Arts Society and it won first prize.