Vona Groarke
Call it quits on a night of rain,
excitable rain that fizzes and simmers
as though it's been waiting years to declare
what it has to declare, and gives the world
an imperative and an urgency. All we can do
is marshal attention, allow the day to dissolve,
as it does, in the nothing of our doing
and the nothing we have done.

That this rain hammers itself home
barely needs to be said. In between,
in the half-held breath, listen for
a sideways shift from Chains to Change,
Wrong to Rung, Seethe to Seed
and, eventually, No to Now.

Day will happen, will break, they say
and when it's done, they'll say it has broken
and we (by 'we', I mean, of course, You and I)
will spend it fitting edge to edge, hour to hour
to convince ourselves a pattern is discernible
for betterment, for focus, for the best.

Whether we are there to divine it
or whether we are not.
from the book LINK: POET AND WORLD / The Gallery Press
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During the pandemic, when our experience of the world became largely a matter of thin threads of communication via technology when we couldn't manage it any other way, didn't the world seem loud and bossy? Against its imperatives, I imagined rain as a kind of counterbalance (coming from elsewhere, bringing us new, connecting us physically with other landscapes, other worlds). Or perhaps truer to say that, because of where I live in Ireland, there was no need to imagine it: rain is pretty much a daily fact. As news is; and as life.
 
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"Cortez’s trademark use of enumeratio—a rhetorical device that builds the force of an argument by offering detailed lists of the parts, causes, or effects of an issue—drives home the ruthlessness of this class of people: “They will try to exploit you / absorb you    confine you / disconnect you     isolate you / or kill you.”  Enumeratio forms the poem’s fundamental structure."  
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