Perfectly aware the time is spring

I have been wondering lately

Why no one in the sixteenth century

Wrote a poem about rain about rain

In the sixteenth century a day's

Downpour or the eleventh century

Roofdrip the women washing clothes

And no dry place to dry them

Children underfoot in the house

Hogarth tells us but the drench

The smoking wet on a seventeenth

Century street corner a shower

Somebody me caught bareheaded

Rain down the cheekbones I miss

In history and poetry wetness

The sound of rain one day's rain

Is there anything in Pepys or Gay

I am in my suburban twentieth

Century cellar bushes in the rain

Beaten into the small windows

I know it is spring it's raining

Like three hundred years ago.