April Rains

I've fallen a little behind in my celebration of National Poetry Month; doing homework all weekend pushed poetry right out of my mind, let me tell you! I have no excuse for yesterday, I just forgot. :(
It is a text-book early-April day outside my office windows: gray, drizzly, heavy rain is expected. The incomparable Langston Hughes wrote a beautifully eloquent poem about rain, April rain in particular:


April Rain Song

By Langston Hughes 

                                            

Let the rain kiss you.

Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.

Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.

The rain makes running pools in the gutter.

The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night—

And I love the rain.

******

Sarah Teasdale wrote of a "soft rain":

There Will Come Soft Rain

By Sarah Teasdale

There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.         

*****

And from my favorite Japanese poet, Basho:

 Spring rain
leaking through the roof
dripping from the wasps' nest.

~Matsuo Basho, translated by Robert Hass