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Most Conversations

Near every grocery-line or petrol-pump,
at every social-gathering or game,
outside of every church or at the dump,
the conversation’s usually the same.
I’m hopefully only halfway through this life,
and yet it feels I’ve been around the block
enough to know, that even with my wife,
while standing on some salt-sprayed, sea-side dock,
or on a woodland hike or on the porch,
or with my colleagues working with our hands,
or near the citronella’s flaming torch,
in local spots as well as distant lands,
people, past and present, when together,
muse about the vagaries of weather.

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Reid McGrath lives and writes in the Hudson Valley Region of New York.

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7 Responses

  1. Margaret Coats

    This could be called as a well-written and suspenseful riddle–except that it gives away its own answer. However, wouldn’t the safest and most reliable of topics do just that? Nice sonnet, Reid, but I hope that most conversations merely begin with or include the weather rather than give it an exclusive focus!

    Reply
  2. Roy Eugene Peterson

    As one raised on a farm, the weather was like an introduction to every discussion and conversation.

    Reply
  3. Paul Freeman

    You’ve brought a ray of sunshine to an overcast England, Reid.

    Reply
  4. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    How true this is, Reid, and you have said it so beautifully in a sonnet that has me thinking of my rain-soaked past and my red-necked present.

    Reply
  5. C.B. Anderson

    And which, as someone once said, is something everybody talks about but which nobody ever does anything about.

    Reply
  6. BDW

    as per Wes Reid Cuebal:

    It’s hard for me to comment on the works of others, for I tend to be too brutal for gentile taste, and I don’t have the leisure to do so. The demands of poetry are enormous, and the duties of a grandfather, though less than that of a father, are likewise demanding—in so many ways.

    Also, I admire very few sonnets. I do like the opening quatrain of “Most Conversations” and L8 reminds me of that texture-rich language found in so much of your juvenilia; but I prefer that earlier powerful and defiant tone.

    Reid’s poems are full of raw energy,
    linguistic power, and remarkable,
    strong phrases that spill over everywhere.
    His art, like rock, is hard and durable;
    its truths are blunt; and Winslow Homer is
    a kindred spirit in that bleak landscape.
    His world, indeed, at times, is onerous,
    like karst escarpments, easy to be scraped.
    It is sincere as mountains, and as staid.
    His lines are sober, somber, serious,
    like rushing rivers, not easy to wade;
    they run the gamut, calm to furious.
    His verbal structures seem like mighty walls,
    or waterfalls of hardy howls and bawls.

    Finally, one thing I can’t forget is that you are the only sonneteer in the NewMillennium, who truly appreciated the tennos—even if only momentarily.

    Reply

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