A REFLECTION on antipodean rain (or rather rains) - both of which sound more dramatic that the Scottish kind.
The weather-man is Les Murray, the distinguished Australian poet; the piece comes from his Collected Poems (Carcanet, £14.95) .
TWO RAINS
Our farm is in the patched blue overlap
between Queensland rain and Victorian rain
(and of two-faced droughts like a dustbowl tap).
The southerly rain is skimmed and curled
off the Roaring Forties' circuit of the world.
It is our chased Victorian silver
and makes wintry asphalt hurry on the spot
or pauses to a vague speed in the air,
whereas, lightning-brewed in a vast coral pot
the tropical weather disgorges its lot
in days of enveloping floodtime blast
towering and warm as a Papuan forest,
a rain you can sweat in, it steams in the sun
like a hard-ridden horse, while southern rain's absorbed
like a cool, fake-colloquial, drawn out lesson.
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