Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Friday, July 23, 2021.

Today's poem is by an Irish poet, who also was a playwright and translator, Seamus Haney.

He lived from April of 1939 to August of 2013.

And the poem that I'm going to read today is, in keeping with a theme from a poem that I shared with you a couple days ago back on Wednesday.

It's called The Rainstick. It was published in 1993. And I believe it was in the New Republic. And I'm reading it out of a collection of poems that was published posthumously called 100 Poems, which was one of my favorite books of poetry that I own because I love Haney's work.

It goes like this.

Upend the rainstick, and what happens next is a music that you never would have known to listen for.

In a cactus stock, 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 were like a rich man entering heaven through the ear of a raindrop.

Listen now again.

I love this poem.

And the subject of it, of course, is, well, the rainstick, which is the title of the poem,

which is, quote, a hollowed-out cactus branch filled with small pebbles that makes the sound

of a gentle shower when tilted.

I found one site where it says that, according to NASA's climate kids website, quote,

the origin of the rain stick is not fully known, but many people think that it probably

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