and petrichor are the real stars
of the English language, how they
mean rain and more rain, deep green
rain, large clear blots on the windshield
reflecting the dazzling colors of brake lights,
streetlights, porch lights, headlights, green
and red and white as Christmas. How they
patter and roll. How we always overdo things,
rushing out into the wet under a yellow umbrella
to be the one sun, the one moving body in a stand
of solemn trees. How the smell of rain means
that a man will leave again, and the faces of daffodils
will shiver like children grieving. How loving the rain
becomes habit, like tonguing a mouth wound open.
Click here to read Meghan Sterling on the origin of the poem.
Image: photo by Jessica Knowlden on Unsplash, licensed under CC 2.0.
Meghan Sterling:As a working mother of a young child and a poet, I find myself craving time and quiet. I wake each morning as early as I can muster to have quiet time to dive into myself and write — it’s the gift I give myself each day. Sometimes it’s ten minutes, sometimes it is an hour. Waking up to write at dawn brings me closer to source, to the past, to the future, the circularity of it, the solitude of it, it is like death as a release, but my death I get to witness each morning and start again. The morning I wrote this poem, there had been deep winter rainfall, and I was remembering rainfall from my tropical childhood, how the rain exploded into the endless green. I was also remembering old friends, and associating deep rainfall with the end of relationships. I collect words, and the words Pluviophile (rain-lover) and Petrichor (smell of rain on dry earth) came to me as the launching point into the beauty and melancholy I was feeling. So I started with those two words, and they led me into surprising places.
Meghan Sterling’s work has been published or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Rhino Poetry, Nelle, Colorado Review, Rattle, and many others, and has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes. Her debut poetry collection, "These Few Seeds" (Terrapin Books), came out in 2021 and was a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize in Poetry. Her chapbook, "Self-Portrait with Ghosts of the Diaspora" (Harbor Editions), her collection "Comfort the Mourners" (Everybody Press) and her collection "View from a Borrowed Field", which won Lily Poetry Review’s Paul Nemser Book Prize, are forthcoming in 2023. She is program director at Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. Read her work at meghansterling.com.
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