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The Rain Stick - Favorite poems: an ongoing series of poems, with commentary, as selected by other poets - Brief Article

Christian Century, Jan 27, 2004 by Heaney Seamus

The Rain Stick

   Up-end 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-rash, 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.
   Up-end the stick again. What happens next

   Is undiminished for having happened once,
   Twice, ten, a thousand time before.
   Who care 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.

"The Rain Stick" from Opened Selected Poems 1996-1996, by Seamus Heaney. [c] 1998 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Starus and Giroux, LLC.

SIMPLE YET magical. A poem about something commonplace but captivating enough to seduce money from people's wallets--a rain stick (for listening to; it has no other use, and is, to say the least, a momentary experience). In this poem Seamus Heaney makes the most of its aural impact, and with each simile--"sluice-rush, spillage, backwash," "subtle little wets," "like a pipe Being played by water," "glitter-drizzle"--the onomatopoeia extends our delighted absorption of this phenomenon so that our own imaginations capture and replay the gentle sounds from memory. At the poem's end, Heaney tells us "Listen now again," and indeed, we can't but listen.

--Luci Shaw, cofounder and senior editor of Harold Shaw Publishers, is author of several collections of poetry and coauthor with Madeleine L'Engle of Friends for the Journey.

The Rain Stick - Favorite poems: an ongoing series of poems, with commentary, as selected by other poets - Brief Article

Christian Century, Jan 27, 2004 by Heaney Seamus

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