Rain in poems usually does the crying for us: the sky darkens when the speaker's mood does. Here the weather has a more practical job. "Whenever I miss you, / It always rains.." The speaker then offers an explanation that is half joke, half plea: "Perhaps to help me, / Hide my pain." Rain becomes a disguise, a way to have a wet face without having to explain it. The word "perhaps" matters. It admits that the sky isn't taking orders and that this is a private superstition, the kind a person invents when they need the world to be on their side. Nothing is known here about the writer beyond a name, so the poem has to stand on its own, and it manages that.
What the speaker misses is not grand. In the second stanza the verbs shift into the past ("used to," "Pat my back") and the memory is a small, physical gesture and a modest sentence: "Telling me I did ok, / Even if I failed." The word is "ok," not "brilliant" or "perfect." The father in this memory doesn't deny the failure. He separates the child's worth from the result. The line suggests his comfort was most needed exactly when it was least deserved, which is why it is so hard to replace.
The word "back" appears twice, with two meanings. In stanza two it is a part of the body, where the comforting hand lands. In stanza three it is a direction: "I want to come back." The poem never says it, but one reading is that the speaker wants to return to the place where that touch happened. There is another possible link. A pat is a light, repeated tap, and so is rain. Perhaps the rain in the first stanza is not only a screen for tears but a faint, weather-sized stand-in for the missing hand. The poem doesn't claim this, but its images lean that way.
The form is plain. There are three quatrains of short lines, mostly a handful of syllables each, so the poem reads like speech with the padding removed. The rhyme loosens as it goes. Stanza one has a clean pair in "rains" and "pain." Stanza two has no real rhyme at all, as though the memory refuses to be tidy. Stanza three ends on a near-echo, "back" and "Dad," which share their short vowel but no longer lock together. Whether or not this was planned, the effect is of composure slipping. The doubled full stops work the same way. Instead of a firm period or a formal ellipsis, the ".." makes lines trail off, as if the speaker keeps losing the thread. The most telling choice is the name. The father is "you" for eleven lines, and only the final word makes him "Dad," so the poem spends its whole length circling the person before saying who he is.
The last stanza is where the poem turns from memory to present need. "It's getting hard" is a quiet but frightening phrase, because it describes grief that is growing rather than fading. "I met many people, / But no one like you Dad.." suggests the speaker has gone somewhere and moved on in practical ways, and that this has not filled the gap. The text doesn't say whether the distance is death, separation, or time. That vagueness makes the poem easier to share, since a reader can fit their own version of loss into it.
The poem matters because it is honest about what love looks like at close range. It doesn't praise a father for big achievements. It remembers the hand on the back and the cheap, priceless sentence "you did ok." It also shows a person learning to hide pain, first behind rain and then behind understatement, while the last line shows how little that disguise can hold. A reader who has ever been reassured by someone they can no longer reach will recognise the whole poem in its final two dots.