Cold Memories - Two for dVerse

 dVerse Poetics: Have You Ever Seen the Rain?

Prompt from Li(sa): Your challenge for today, if you choose to accept it, is to choose... 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.

Going with the suggestion of taking a weather song, I have taken two.  One is mostly fiction, one is mostly fact.

A Golden Shovel using a line from November Rain by Guns N' Roses.
And it's hard to hold a candle in the cold November rain

A Golden Shovel is an invented form, created by Terrance Hayes.  It is written by taking a line or lines from an existing poem and using each word as end words in your poem. The words are kept in order.  Credit is always given. 

A Cold November 

Autumn comes, and

once again it’s

hit me hard.

My daily struggle: to

carry on, to hold

my tears, to smile. A

spice scented candle,

a puddle on the counter in

a once shared kitchen, the

wax now as cold

as the November

night you died alone in the rain. 

©2026 Lisa Smith Nelson. All Rights Reserved  

My second is from Eurythmics' Here Comes the Rain Again, where I

 took inspiration from the line: 

Here comes the rain again falling on my head like a memory

Memories

It was raining

the day you died.

The phones were dead.

A squirrel had chewed through the lines.

I wonder if the squirrel died too,

free-falling to the wet sidewalk,

as I did to the floor? 

©2026 Lisa Smith Nelson. All Rights Reserved