PAD Day 13: The Smell of Rain

 Sometimes life gets in the way of poetry, so I am running a couple of days behind. I hope to catch up soon, but it's shaping up to be an extremely busy month. 

Today's prompts:

WBP: Write a "living" poem.

PSH: "Think of a smell you may have recently experienced that had the power to plunge you back into some experience in the distant past you had all but forgotten about. What is the smell? Where and when did you smell it? Who were you with? Use your description of the smell and place and person to show the reader how it makes you feel to experience this scent again." (Robbie Nester)

NPWM: Start by creating a “word bank” of ten simple words. They should only have one or two syllables apiece. Five should correspond to each of the five senses (i.e., one word that is a thing you can see, one word that is a type of sound, one word that is a thing you can taste, etc). Three more should be concrete nouns of whatever character you choose (i.e., “bridge,” “sun,” “airplane,” “cat”), and the last two should be verbs. Now, come up with rhymes for each of your ten words.... Use your expanded word-bank, with rhymes, as the seeds for your poem....

These prompts go together fairly well today. Let me start with the word bank, which to be honest I picked, not randomly, but with a topic in mind:

Sight: lightning

Sound: thunder

Smell: earth

Taste: salt

Touch: rain

3 concrete nouns: tree, seed, sky

2 verbs: crack, shake

So the expanded word bank with rhymes will be:

lightning frightening thunder under earth rebirth salt fault rain drain

tree free seed weed sky dry crack back shake quake

And the title is the word for the first smell of rain on dry earth:

Petrichor

We’ve suffered for so many months under
This drought, the wracked ground cracked as from a quake,
Our crops unsprouted. So we welcome thunder,
Threat and promise, rolling in to shake
Our house. The lightning forking through the sky
Is frightening but welcome too. The rain,
A scatter of big drops, bombards the dry
And kicks up dust at first, but then our plain
Sends up a scent, a mix of salt and earth
And ozone from the air, a sign we’re freed
From thirst and famine. Soon we’ll see rebirth
Of plants and trees, of rivers, even weed.
This thunderstorm, no harbinger of doom,
quenched us instead and brought us sweet perfume.

I used most of the words from the word bank except "fault." Twelve of them were used as end rhymes and the others were used within the poem, sometimes setting up internal rhymes. Also I changed "free" to "freed" and rhymed it with "weed." It may not be my best sonnet, but I'm glad to finally turn out a "formal" poem this month.