A storm batters a city, and almost nobody is bothered. That quiet joke sits at the centre of "Drowning in the wake of the rain" by socially_averse. The poem dresses an ordinary wet day in the language of a full-scale war, then reveals that its only real witness is a student in a classroom, staring out through a window grille. Its central idea is the gap between a vivid inner life and an indifferent outside world. The weather is enormous, but the one person it truly reaches is the one who is stuck, still and watching.
The imagery works in two layers. First the sky becomes a creature. The opening line gives it "suppressed emotions," as if the heavens had been holding something back, and the next line gives it a body: "a blur of grey fur and voluptuous roars." A few lines later "the grey wolves above grew louder," so the single beast has become a pack. Running alongside is a second metaphor of battle: "volleys of arrows," rain that "pounded," a "battle" that "raged on," and the threat of someone falling "prey." Both metaphors are about attack, yet the poem keeps showing the attack failing. The rain "bounced off harmlessly" and "nothing could halt the city." The roads "glittered like polished lead," a clever detail, since lead is normally dull and heavy but here it shines, and it is also the stuff of bullets. The road seems armoured and pretty at once, and it bats its "eyelashes oh-so-cluelessly." That teasing tone deflates the epic. The city is not a victim but a flirtatious bystander.
The form suits this. There is no regular metre and, for most of the poem, no rhyme. The opening lines run long, as though the sky were spilling over. Further down the lines shrink to clipped, hard-edged bursts: "Trees crashed into tar / Water clung to legs." The radio simile is quietly odd, because rain that "grew louder, and dimmed" swells and fades in the same breath. That is exactly how a badly tuned station behaves, and how rain sounds to someone only half-listening. The classroom arrives in the next line, where the "chatter of the class almost drowned out the din outside." Then comes the one-word line "Almost." It works like a held breath. The storm will not be silenced, and the word returns in "Almost as if," so the poem keeps circling the idea of something nearly happening. A run of mocking adverbs, "innocently," "cluelessly," "harmlessly," gives the middle of the poem a sing-song chime that undercuts its own drama.
The ending shows how carefully the poem has been shaped. The camera has been pulling inward all along, from heavens to city to roads and finally to one person, and the word "Except" is the hinge. Only here does the poem give a proper rhyme, "day" with "way," as if the sound were finally allowed to settle. What it settles on is a refusal: "grills that would never give way." On a second reading, much of the violence looks like something the student has imagined to fill the time. The whole battle may exist only in that gaze. Words like "drowning" and "drowned" appear in the opening line and in the classroom, and the title adds "wake," which can mean the aftermath of a storm or a vigil kept over something. That is one possible reading, but it fits a figure watching and waiting while everyone else chats.
The poem is worth reading because it makes a familiar, slightly dull moment feel enormous without pretending the moment is anything else. Nearly everything in it is impervious: the roads, the city, the grills, the rain that bounces away. The one thing that can be reached is the student, who "fell prey to its vicious beauty." Beauty here is not comforting. It is something that can hold you in place while the world carries on, and anyone who has watched rain from behind glass will recognise that feeling.