Seen better days

Leaky drainpipe, Portland General Electric building.

Chantler63 Shakespeare Challenge and National Poetry Writing Month
Well-known phrases from Shakespeare
Day 19: ‘seen better days’ (As You Like it)

As I type this, I can hear through my open window the glad clanging of cathedral bells to announce the good news of the Resurrection. We have endured the forty days of Lent and the alleluias have returned.
Happy Easter!

And now, back to our program.

I couldn't imagine what to photograph for this challenge topic. My car? My face? Both have certainly seen better days. But when I came outside after water aerobics this morning it was raining cats and dogs, probably also koalas and kookaburras. What a cloudburst. This old drainpipe has certainly seen better days, and it was making quite a splash, a veritable Esther Williams spectacle of water. It rained spectacularly on and off all day, with occasional 'sunbreaks' as we in the Pacific Northwest say.

(Sorry that the drops of water came out looking more like white paint. I was trying to take pictures and hold an umbrella at the same time. I should probably have turned off HDR. Forgive me, it's only an iPhone. It and I have our limitations.)


Oh, right, poem.
No time to write one, I marked up another fifty pages of my novel today. (That includes comments like "Fix this!" and "Didn't I say this elsewhere?" so markups do not a finished product make.)
I have, in more leisurely days, written several poems about rain. Here's one (circa 1995) from my hoard.
I have now been nominated for the Nobel Prize in cheating. If you're Swedish, please vote for me.


CANTO DEL NIÑO*

Outside my window just at dawn,
an orchestra of rain —
as if the unpacific sea,
hurled skyward with a boisterous glee,
had hurtled down again.

A scrub jay screeched a loud complaint
above the garden mud,
while tree limbs buckled, creaked, and groaned
to wind gust’s violinic moan
rippling the rising flood.

An early train fanfared its horn
like organ trumpets blaring,
a confidence-inspiring show
exuberantly inquiring how
its little towns were faring.

Spring leaves bounced pizzicato drops,
storm gutters dripped and plunked
arpeggios of harp-like chord,
and wind chimes tinkled to applaud
the way the world was dunked.

All snug beneath a heap of quilts,
I listened to the strain
the great Conductor in the sky
had summoned into symphony
from simple morning rain.


El Niño is one of the two alternating Pacific Coast weather patterns, the other being La Niña. This poem was written during an El Niño storm.