And I love the rain

April Rain Song

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.

–Langston Hughes, from Collected Poems. Copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes.

Because it’s raining today, and it’s the start of April, and it’s National Poetry Month, let’s stand out on the deck, hold the bucket out, let it fill with poems, and get a bit drenched.

As I did last April, I’ll update this post every day this month with a link to a different poem.

April 1 ~ April Rain Song ~ Langston Hughes
April 2 ~ Instructions for how to get ahead of yourself while the light still shines ~ Jenny Bornholdt
April 3 ~ Things keep sorting themselves ~ Jane Hirshfield
April 4 ~ Thinking of Madame Bovary ~ Jane Kenyon
April 5 ~ Ave Maria ~ Frank O’Hara
April 6 ~ Gic to Har ~ Kenneth Rexroth
April 7 ~ Sphere – Kate Gale
April 8 ~ One Day ~ Robert Creeley
April 9 ~ The Mower’s Song ~ Andrew Marvell
April 10 ~ The Things ~ Donald Hall
April 11 ~ Here ~ Grace Paley
April 12 ~ General Prologue, The Canterbury Tales ~ Geoffrey Chaucer
April 13 ~ Lovers on Aran ~ Seamus Heaney
April 14 ~ I Started Early – Took my Dog ~ Emily Dickinson
April 15 ~ Oystering ~ Richard Howard
April 16 ~ A River ~ John Poch
April 17 ~ Rules for Captain Ahab’s Provincetown Poetry Workshop ~ Martin Espada
April 18 ~ Early Morning: Cape Cod ~ May Swenson
April 19 ~ The Peace of Wild Things ~ Wendell Berry
April 20 ~ A Recipe for Whisky ~ Ron Butlin
April 21 ~ Pied Beauty ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins
April 22 ~ Earth Day ~ Jane Yolen
April 23 ~ A Cold Spring ~ Elizabeth Bishop
April 24 ~ Musée des Beaux Arts ~ W. H. Auden
April 25 ~ Musée de Beaux Arts Revisited ~ Billy Collins
April 26 ~ Ulysses ~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson
April 27 ~ Edward Hopper’s New York Movie ~ Joseph Stanton
April 28 ~ Some days (For Paula) ~ James Baldwin
April 29 ~ A Dish of Peaches from Russia ~ Wallace Stevens
Arpil 30 ~ The Shape of the Air Around the Girl in the Birchbark Canoe ~ Annie Dillard