The Rain by Zbigniew Herbert . This is a poem that turns and keeps turning. Who is this “older brother” returned from war? Which war? What kind of return? War’s aftermath, or really its unending presence, was an inevitable subject for Polish poets in the decades after 1945, and Zbigniew Herbert slyly begins “The Rain” by introducing one more returned soldier, a member of the family, an older brother decorated with a real and metaphorical silver star. But the star, the wound, is the poem’s first turning, an abyss we fall into, because it’s not even the recent war of shared memory that he’s returning from, but World War I, and not just that, he’s a survivor of the Napoleonic Wars, the fifteenth-century battle…