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August 15,
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Hello to All Poetic Pubsters gathered here at this site of inspired wordsmithing. I’m Lisa from Tao-Talk today as your host, offering gustatory morsels and refreshing libations along with a prompt that may whet your muse’s appetite.

The standard go-to in casual conversations when you’ve run out of things to say is to comment on the weather. One of the reasons why is that it is always there, along with the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies. We take it for granted in nature poetry and fall back on it without thinking twice. It’s easy to categorize weather in binaries of good/bad, usually in a particular context. For example good because it is sunny and warm so the family picnic at the park is happening. It takes on another connotation when your crops are drying up and you need a rainy day to keep them alive. Weather is all about perspective, and often there is no middle ground in how our perspective spins it.

Weather is background noise that fades to insignificance after we’ve put our finger on the pulse of the day. Where for millennia we’ve stepped outside and grokked the weather, increasingly we click on a phone app that separates us from our senses. We let complicated measuring apparatus predict weather over a week into the future to influence our moods.

Weather also works well as metaphor, as others have discussed in past dVerse essays/prompts:

Stuart McPherson wrote a prompt about weather in 2012.
Victoria C. Slotto wrote about it in 2015.
Andrew Wilson wrote about it in 2024.

I decided to look for poems including the word “forecast” and found a few gems. One is about a micro vs. a macro view of holiday.

After You Get Up Early on Memorial Day

By Susanna Lang

You take the cats out with you, shut

the door: I have the whole wide bed, all

the covers to fall back asleep in, while you

cut up and sugar the strawberries, grind

the coffee, leave the radio off

so I won't be disturbed. The room is still

dark, rain forecast for the entire day,

other people's family picnics cancelled,

barbecues moved into basements, parades

rerouted to avoid flooded viaducts, the iris

losing petals beside newly cleaned graves,

their mason jars spilt into the saturated ground.

But here is my holiday, this drift back beneath thought

while I lie in the warm impression of your body.

The next one gives a framework of weather but is filled in with other people, places, and things.

On Seeing Charlotte Brontë’s Underwear

 with my Daughter in Haworth

By Vona Groarke

“Are they real?” We have pages of kitchen utensils and books

and candlesticks and nibs, but the charcoal pencil and new sketchpad

are squat as aubergines in her hands in front of this display.

With bad weather forecast and light silting up in cramped windows,

we are the only visitors. The year settles in a corner of the room,

has removed its white gloves, tip by tip, and set to one side...


I would encourage you to click on the title above and go read the rest of this exquisite poem.

Now we have come to my favorite part of the prompt. Your challenge for today, if you choose to accept it, is to choose have your way with the weather. Use it as a framework. Or a metaphor. Or as a vehicle to get you where your muse wants to go. Any form or length is fine. I would love to see someone take a favorite weather song and pay tribute to its lyrics or melody. Please put attribution on your page if you choose that path. I’m very much looking forward to reading your poems.

New to dVerse? Here’s how to join in:

• Write a poem (in any form) in response to the challenge.
• Enter a link directly to your poem and your name by clicking Mr. Linky below
  and remember to check the little box to accept the use/privacy policy.
• You will find links to other poets, and more will join so please do check
  back later to read their poems.
• Read and comment on other poets’ work– we all come here to have our poems read.
• Please link back to dVerse from your site/blog.