“And the rain came,” the first line announces, as if we are joining a story already underway. That opening “And” matters: there is no clean beginning, no before. Gjini does not present a storm with a cause or a clearing. He presents a condition. The rain has arrived, but “no one can remember when.” Memory has already blurred. The line is plain, almost conversational, yet it makes the rain feel both ancient and immediate. From the start, the poem is less about weather than about living inside something that cannot be dated or explained.
Then the poem turns inward. “Here, with us, / in us,” it says, moving in three small steps from location to company to interior. The rain becomes a state of being rather than an external event. This is intensified by the second uncertainty: “no one knows how long it’s going to stay.” The earlier phrase “no one can remember when” looked backward; this one looks forward. Together they trap the speaker and others between a lost origin and an unknown end. The plural “us” suggests a shared condition, but there is no collective answer, only collective ignorance.
The poem is unrhymed and irregular, which suits its subject: no neat pattern arrives to contain the dampness. The imagery is deliberately muted. Nights become “starless,” days “grey.” There is no lightning, thunder, or drama—just the erasure of light and contrast. The paired phrases, “Making our nights starless, / Our days grey,” create a rhythm of diminishing clarity. The absence of stars removes direction and wonder; greyness removes colour and variation.
Then the syntax itself seems to buckle under the damp. “And us walking fish,” the poem continues after a full stop, as if the grammar has been waterlogged. The phrase is strange enough to make a reader pause. Are these people like fish out of water, gasping? Or have they evolved into something amphibious, suited to a permanently wet world? The image suggests both: survival and monstrous change. A walking fish is a contradiction, a creature caught between elements, no longer fully at home in one.
The final sentence compresses the poem’s force. In a “soggy space, which is rotting / everything,” the landscape is not simply wet; it is actively decaying. The word “soggy” carries a dull, heavy sound, and the line break after “rotting” leaves the verb hanging before the final word lands: “everything.” That last word is absolute. The rain does not damage one object or one part of life; it undoes everything. Yet the tone remains quiet, even resigned. Nobody shouts or flees. The speaker observes from within the condition, speaking for a “we” that has learned to move through it.
What makes the poem significant is its restraint. It never says what the rain stands for—grief, political oppression, depression, or simply a long season of hardship. Because it withholds that explanation, the rain can carry many meanings while remaining physically vivid. Its power lies in the unnerving sense that the worst conditions often have no certain beginning and no promised end, and that people learn to live inside them, becoming strange to themselves in the process.