Writing – Of Rain and Poetry

With all the prose writing I do, I also do a bit of poetry.  At least, I think of this as poetry.  Seems like a good time to share it here.

Petrichor

I do not know the word

For the smell.

It is the smell of rain,

Rain on the hot pavement of summer.

You can smell it now, can’t you?

I want to call it “flinty”

because it reminds me of stone.

The stone of the roads of my youth.

Stone and tar roads, hot and sticky.

The rain would fall

And I would smell that smell.

Decades later and the smell is still here.

It takes me back to that other place.

The smell brings me peace.

It is the fragrance of memory.

I didn’t know there was a word for that smell.  Of course, there is!  Petrichor is that smell associated rain on pavement after a long dry spell.