10 Comments

It feels like wild grief, how it is also constrained in the words trying to get out.

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Thank you so much for that perceptive comment! When I read a good ghazal, I often feel that the form, instead of constraining with the repetition, enhances the emotion of the speaker by replicating that struggle to put a civilised veneer over wild emotion, but not quite succeeding. I was hoping to capture that!

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Sep 9, 2023Liked by Conny Borgelioen

I read and feel a poignant tension between the consolation of nature & a longing for the relief of a deep, soaking rain. Which will come one day, in its time.

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Thank you, Ann. I felt that tension too as I was writing the poem, so I'm glad it comes across.

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Sep 9, 2023Liked by Conny Borgelioen

The epistrophe frequently noting the failure to rain serves us up the ideas not only that nothing good can be taken for granted in this world, but that simple abundance is often elusive until we choose to look in places we had not thought to before. There’s certainly no dearth of sorrow in it!

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It just goes to show how useful the weather is to convey deep emotions. I'll never look at small talk about the weather in the same way after writing this poem.

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Sep 9, 2023Liked by Conny Borgelioen

Gosh where to begin? Thank you for teaching me this verse form I was unfamiliar with. You’ve inspired me to write of such sadnesses of my own. I’m shook.

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Sep 9, 2023Liked by Conny Borgelioen

This is a wonderful poem Conny! You turn sadness into something sublime. The repetition of the phrase 'it is still not raining' conveys a sense of shock.

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Thank you, Dominic! I wrote this poem a while ago in a very dry period. I was literally waiting for rain. Everyone was. The phrase got stuck in my head, and it turned out to be the perfect metaphor for this poem.

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Sep 10, 2023Liked by Conny Borgelioen

Hmmm. Yes, it fits well here.

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