Rain

Growing up (mostly) in the Northwest, I have a lot of experience with, and affinity for, the rain.

As an aside, I believe rain is one of those dividing points among humans. If you’ve lived here for any period of time, you either relish the weather, revel in its siren song Read-Write-Make-Soup, or you despise it, feel as if you can never get fully dry, as if you can sense moss spores taking hold between your fingers and your toes.

I fall into the first category, my sister most definitively falls into the latter.

Periodically, NPR invites its listeners to participate in crowdsourced poetry, often by writing a poem in the style of a beloved poet. In August, 2019, the project focused on Kentucky Poet Laureate George Ella Lyon’s Where I’m From poem. NPR CrowdSource Out of the invitation from NPR grew my own Where I’m From poem. Not surprisingly, it’s about rain.

____________________________________________________________

Wet Feet - by Shari Lane

I am from rain pounding pattering misting moisting
all around the city,
making rainbows in the streetlights and puddles and once
a whole brown river in the street,
so we got out the canoe and paddled away to
nowhere.

I am from country rain, too,
drowned fields and crawdad races in the rain-swollen creek and
finding the tattered remnants of the fort we built
around the lightning-struck tree stump,
where the cows kicked through the thin plastic we used for walls
because they thought it looked warm and dry inside and
cows get tired of the rain, after a while.

Even Oregon cows.

I am from plastic purple-framed glasses
and a patchwork quilt baseball cap
and the cheap JC Penney jeans with patches in the knees
my stepmother bought because they’ll last longer,
never mind that I am humiliated, HUMILIATED,
by patches-in-the-knees jeans.

I am from whole days curled up in bed reading through those
plastic purple-framed glasses peering out from under
the patchwork quilt baseball cap and eating
chocolate,
every kind is good, though Chocolite is best, when I could get it.

I am every heroine who ever leapt from the pages of a book:
MegMurryAnneShirleyJoMarch,
and so many others I’ve lost their names,
the ones who stood up when someone said
Sit down and act like a lady.

I am from old photos hidden in an empty bureau
as if the memory itself is shameful,
the child with too-long bangs
standing on a porch waiting for a cab to pick me up
and take me to an airport to fly to the Other Place
where the Other Parent will pick me up,
looking out from under those bangs with a shy, ferocious grin,
hand firmly on the battered suitcase that holds
‘most everything I own,
wondering why each parent always sends me away after a while,
wondering what I would have to do
to be good enough
to keep.

______________________________________________________________

Where are you from? Do you have a poem or a memory that describes the threads and experiences that, plucked and twanged by the music of Time, made you who you are? The Comments Section is made for sharing . . .

Image of rain on fall leaves by Hannah Domsic @hannah_e_d; thumbnail image of leaf in the rain by Max Böhme @max_thehuman

Want more? Read George Ella Lyon’s poem and description of the Where I’m From project that was intended as a “response to the fear- and hate-mongering alive in our country today.” George Ella Lyon