Rain in summer is weather out of place, and Jason Ridpath builds his whole poem on that small wrongness. "Feels so strange to hear the droplets of rain" drops its subject, so the line sounds muttered aloud rather than composed. Summer is supposed to be the season when things get better. Instead, a sound at the window sets off a chain of memory.
The second line brings the poem's first rhyme, rain with brain, and its first surprise. The rain is "tapping on the ledge and infecting my brain." The verb is "infecting," not soothing or calming, so the sound reads like a contagion that spreads through the speaker's thoughts. Then the poem reverses itself. The same noise "plays like a playlist of our favourite songs," and what felt like an invasion becomes something loved. That little word "our" tells us there is a shared past, though the poem never says who the other person is, and it is wiser not to guess. All we know is that something was shared and that it hurt.
The next line is the most abstract, and it stops the poem short: "Beauty seems to conform to the lies of artistry." After enjoying the rain-as-music, the speaker grows suspicious of it. "Seems" hedges, and "conform" suggests beauty being squeezed into a mould. A playlist is curated, after all. It keeps the good tracks and skips the rest, and the speaker seems to fear that memory edits in the same way.
The seasons then become a kind of scorecard. Winter was "survival of the fittest," a phrase from the language of nature and competition, which makes the hard months sound like a contest with no mercy. Summer was not the golden reward you might expect. It was "trying to balance out the hits and the misses." There is a nice echo here, because "hits" quietly returns us to the music world, so the playlist metaphor keeps working underneath the talk of scales and balance. Summer, in this poem, is bookkeeping rather than bliss.
The wish comes next: "I wished upon borrowed time that our pain would disappear." The line twists the familiar wishing-on-a-star idea. Borrowed time has to be paid back, so this wish comes with a deadline attached. The deadline arrives in the following line, the longest and flattest in the poem: "The summer ends making way for another academic year." Judging by this line, the speaker's year is shaped by school or university terms, though the poem doesn't say more. The calendar language is practical and unromantic, and that is the point. Life moves on to its next scheduled stage whether or not the pain has gone.
Here the rhyme returns. Disappear, year and here form a chain that closes the poem like a door. "The trials and tribulations are still here" is a worn-out phrase, and its dullness works well. The troubles have become routine, something you mention the way you mention the weather. "Trials" might even carry a hint of exams, though that is a possibility rather than a certainty.
The final line has no full stop: "Manifestation must still be in gestation." The two -ation words rhyme inside one line, and the result sounds like a mantra repeated to keep doubt away. "Manifestation" answers the earlier wish, since it is the idea of willing something into reality. "Gestation" suggests something unborn but growing, which leaves a thread of hope. The word "must" is the most revealing. It could signal confidence, or it could be self-persuasion, and the missing punctuation leaves the question open.
The form supports this. There is no regular metre, only long, loose, speech-like lines. Rhyme appears at the start and again near the end, while the middle runs mostly unrhymed. One way to read this is that the poem's structure frays while the speaker sifts through complicated memories, and tightens again when the present returns.
The poem matters because it refuses an easy ending. It lets memory comfort and deceive in the same breath, it mixes modern words like "playlist" and "manifestation" into the old pattern of the seasons, and it will not pretend that summer heals. It ends mid-wait, with a wish still unborn.