In the wake of Tropical Storm Debby threatening to destroy my beloved Mojo Dojo Casa House A.K.A. the Bryan County News’ main office on Ford Avenue, I must announce that this week’s column from me will be very brief, filled to the brim only with some rain-related poetry.

I hope that everyone reading this stays safe and takes care of themselves and their families and neighbors during this inclement weather!

To the Rain Ursula K. Le Guin 

Mother rain, manifold, measureless, falling on fallow, on field and forest, on house-roof, low hovel, high tower, downwelling waters all-washing, wider than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster than countrysides, calming, recalling: return to us, teaching our troubled souls in your ceaseless descent to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root, to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the sea.

Rain Kazim Ali 

With thick strokes of ink the sky fills with rain.

Pretending to run for cover but secretly praying for more rain.

Over the echo of the water, I hear a voice saying my name.

No one in the city moves under the quick sightless rain.

The pages of my notebook soak, then curl. I’ve written: “Yogis opened their mouths for hours to drink the rain.”

The sky is a bowl of dark water, rinsing your face.

The window trembles; liquid glass could shatter into rain.

I am a dark bowl, waiting to be filled. If I open my mouth now, I could drown in the rain.

I hurry home as though someone is there waiting for me.

The night collapses into your skin. I am the rain.

Rain Peter Everwine

 Toward evening, as the light failed and the pear tree at my window darkened, I put down my book and stood at the open door, the first raindrops gusting in the eaves, a smell of wet clay in the wind. Sixty years ago, lying beside my father, half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain drummed against our tent, I heard for the first time a loon’s sudden wail drifting across that remote lake—a loneliness like no other, though what I heard as inconsolable may have been only the sound of something untamed and nameless singing itself to the wilderness around it and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father and of good companions gone into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain and the soft lapping of water, and did not know whether it was grief or joy or something other that surged against my heart and held me listening there so long and late.

Andrea Gutierrez is the managing editor of the Bryan County News.