Our Nasty Weather Is Someone's Disaster

Within the "Bad Poetry" category, I think of this one as a separate sub-category I call "The Poetry of Real Appalachian Speech." 

I’ve been accused of having a Northern accent. Middle Atlantic, I’d say. I’ve never tried to talk like the older residents of the Blue Ridge Mountains. That would be misleading for speakers of the dialect and confusing for people who've learned the BBC or ABC versions of English. But I have written down things older mountain people have said and thought, “That’s a poem.” This one was actually a conversation in which some of the words were spoken by me. 

The general pattern has held true since this poem was published on AC, more than ten years ago. Reforestation has continued to attract a lot more rain than my part of the world got when I was growing up, and when the humidity starts to get on my nerves, the news media are usually reporting that it’s an “edge” of a weather pattern that’s killing people and destroying buildings somewhere else. Over the weekend, in local phenology, the February Thaw began with floods (Gate City's Quarry Pond spilled up across West Jackson Street! Everybody's cellar was wet!), so this bit of Bad Poetry seems timely again today...

Well, it’s raining again.

Dang! Wasn’t supposed to rain till evening.

Stupid weather forecasts.

Stupid forecasters.

Anybody’d have to be stupid to try to forecast the weather around here.

Well, some say they need more rain.

Who says who needs more rain?

Everything is rotting, rusting, falling apart

because all we ever get around here is rain.

Two years in a  row, almost every day, all summer long, rain.

Georgia gets a snowstorm. We get rain.

New England gets an ice storm. We get rain.

Ohio gets a blizzard. We get rain.

Big Stone Gap, Virginia, gets a freak tornado

which shouldn’t be possible, in its location. We get rain.

The creek’s up over the road, up there.

You’re joking. That high up the mountain? Can’t be.

Is, though.

Dang! You know I didn’t even want to buy that land.

They said it wasn’t supposed to rain this morning.

We get rain.

Turn on the computer.

Two dead in Murfreesboro, Tennessee,

which isn’t supposed to get tornadoes either.

Three dead in Arkansas. No body count yet in Kentucky.

We get rain.

Maybe we are supposed to learn something profound from this

but I’m not going to be the one to preach about it

because I still absolutely hate

all this rain.

Everyone in town seems glad to see the sunshine...some of the puddles left over along the road started to freeze, overnight, but now the sun feels warm. People who stayed inside last week have ventured out, making my little town look positively busy today.