Lightning-Scenes

"The lightning-scene is a frequent topos of early Arabic verse, in which the speaker commemorates a night made sleepless by the thunder and lightning of an approaching storm. In the course of preparing his forthcoming English-language edition of The Book of Rain by Abū Zayd al-Anṣārī (d. ca. 830 CE), poet and translator David Larsen took in enough examples of the topos to make a small collection. The result is Wave Pamphlet #10: ten variations on the classical theme by Arab poets of the first centuries before and after the Prophet Muḥammad's epochal Migration of 622. Each is an exercise in nature poetry of a highly specific kind, dedicated to the power of the sky to alter the ground, and each begins with lightning, kerygmatic emblem of the life-renewing rain."--Publisher's website (viewed 2015-10-09).