A rain date is the backup day set aside when bad weather cancels an outdoor event. Dave Bonta's title plays with that idea, because in his poem the rain is the event, and it has been rescheduled for far too long. The poem lasts only nine lines, but it holds a whole small philosophy: what we wait for gives more pleasure when it finally comes, and the right response to that pleasure is to move.
The first stanza sets the scene through smell. "Petrichor" is a wonderfully strange word for something so ordinary. It comes from Greek roots meaning "stone" and the fluid said to run in the veins of gods, so even the vocabulary suggests that wet earth is a little bit divine. Bonta defines it plainly, though, as "that musk the soil gives off after rain." The word "musk" makes the smell animal and physical rather than pretty. Then comes the idea that carries the poem: the scent is "strongest when long delayed." The phrase reads as a fact about soil, but it also works as a rule for feeling. The dash before it opens a pause, as if the speaker were breathing in.
The second stanza turns from observation to a question: "So who wouldn't choose / a day like today for dancing?" The "So" pretends to be logical, as though joy followed from the weather like a conclusion in an argument. The question is casual and teasing, and it invites the reader to agree. Notice that the poem never says anyone is dancing. The word is placed in our minds first, and only then do we see what it applies to.
Bonta also delays the answer. The second stanza ends on a dangling phrase, "Side by side, cackling softly," and we have to cross the stanza break to learn who is doing the cackling. This enjambment is a small echo of the poem's theme, since we are made to wait a moment for our reward, just as the soil waited for rain. The phrase "cackling softly" is a nice contradiction too. A cackle is usually harsh and loud, and "softly" turns it into something private, like two companions sharing a joke.
The sound of the last stanza imitates the birds' movement. "Pileated woodpeckers" is a bumpy, many-syllabled phrase, and "hitch their way down a tall locust tree" is built from short, blunt words, with hard sounds in "hitch" and "locust." The line moves in small jerks, as a woodpecker does on a trunk. Then the rhythm eases into the final line, "all the way to the ground," whose longer, smoother stretch feels like settling. The direction matters as well. Woodpeckers are usually pictured climbing up trees, so a descent is a quiet surprise. Ending on "ground" also brings us back to the "soil" of the first stanza, so the poem finishes at the source of the smell it began with.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The three tercets are free verse, and their plain, conversational tone lets the images do the work. That plainness suits the subject, because the poem is about noticing something small and being glad of it. The woodpeckers' "dance" is only their ordinary way of moving down a tree, yet the speaker's mood makes it look like celebration. The title may add one more joke: two birds side by side on a "date" fits with a "rain date." That reading is an inference, but the poem's light tone supports it.
The poem is significant for how much it trusts a quick moment of attention. It doesn't explain its happiness or turn the birds into a lecture about nature. It gives us a smell, a question, and a pair of birds, and lets the connection form on its own. The poem suggests that joy often needs no occasion beyond a long wait ending, and that a day "like today" is reason enough to dance.