This was one of two poems that I sent of for publication. I was reasonably happy with the poem at the time, contrasting long dry paragraphs full of dry words with shorter ones that were more fluid. It's not a new story, but I hope it was a bit of a different viewpoint.

The editors were not impressed - but I largely disagreed with their comments and reasons for rejecting both it and The Dragon. But their magazine, their choice. you can find the rest of the story in the Notes on the Fish link.

So I didn't rewrite it at the time. But when I edited it, I found that it could be improved considerably. There was a little bit of merit in the criticism, but also I had developed a bit more of a style, there were repeated words and I found better words and phrases. So there are quite a lot of changes here. If anyone has any interest (I assume you might, if you are reading the notes,) then you may need to print both the original and the update to look at all that happened.

The smaller "rainy" bits are 6 lines each. The rhyme varies for each (A-B-A-C-B-C; A-B-A-B-A-B; A-B-C-C-A-B; A-B-C-A-B-C). Like a stream, it changes as it flows.

The "dry" bits are worse. Like the drought, the first 3 verses go on and get longer: 12 lines; 14 lines; 18 lines. The last, about Noah, "took a different tack" and return to the length of the first: 12 lines. Rhyme patterns for each are:

Verse 1: A-B-A-B-C-C-D-E-F-D-E-F
Verse 2: A-B-C-A-B-C-D-E-F-D-E-G-F-G
Verse 3: A-B-C-A-B-C-D-E-F-D-F-E-G-H-I-G-I-H
Verse 4: A-B-C-B-A-C-D-E-F-D-E-F

You could break these verses up and take the first 6 lines of each verse separately - these are all variants of the patterns in the "wet" verses. The second set of 6 in the 1st and 4th verses are a similar pattern too. The remaining 8 and 12 line stems cannot be so easily broken - splitting verse 3 into three 6 line verse could be done with only a minor amount of work, but the 8 line stem in verse two means there is not a great deal of point. Like the drought, it takes a long time to break.