March 15: End of Day, Seamus Heaney, "The Rain Stick"

I am approaching my twelfth hour of waking.  The day's chores are done.  The house smells clean.  Lemon.  Lysol.  I'm sitting in the living room in the quiet, awaiting the noise of son and daughter.  For now, though, there is peace.  An end-of-day peace.  A peace in which all I hear is the tick-tick-tick of the clock on the wall, counting down the seconds to night.  I am tired but full as I look around this room.  It is like a yard shoveled after a snowstorm, an empty basket waiting dirty clothes.  I know how Noah felt standing on the deck of the ark as the rain clouds rolled in.  He felt worthy of a nap, a time to sit and pick the splinters from his calloused hands.

This P.O.E.T.S. Day, I have chosen to share a poem by Seamus Heaney, in honor of Saint Patrick's Day.  You see, Heaney was the second writer from Ireland to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.  The first was W. B. Yeats.  Anyway, this poem comes from Heaney's collection The Spirit Level.

Saint Marty wishes all of you a restful evening.

The Rain Stick

for Beth and Rand

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 it scales
Like a gutter stopping trickling.  And now here comes
A sprinkle of drops out of 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.

The ear of a raindrop