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


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!
As one raised on a farm, the weather was like an introduction to every discussion and conversation.
You’ve brought a ray of sunshine to an overcast England, Reid.
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.