good words for this day

( youngest is 18 today!)

A  poem for her  with a wish 
to hear music that you never would have known 

To listen for.

The Rain Stick, by Seamus Heaney

Upend the rain stick and what happens next

Is a music that you never would have known 

To listen for. In a cactus stalk

-

Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash

Come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe

Being played by water, you shake it again lightly

-

And diminuendo runs through all its scales

Like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes

A sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,

-

Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies;

Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.

Upend the stick again. What happens next

-

Is undiminished for having happened once,

Twice, ten, a thousand times before.

Who cares if all the music that transpires

-

Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?

You are like a rich man entering heaven

Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.