Water Water Everywhere - National Poetry Day 2013

I was struggling with what to post on today when I noticed that it is National Poetry Day and this years theme is "Water, water everywhere" which is apt as I have been on the high seas for most of the last month and the weather here in Cornwall forecasts a solid day of torrential rain with possible flooding. 

Click here for a beautiful hymn - "The Clouds Veil."

 

 This image above is taken from my previous post on Rainy Day Prayers Poems and Blessings from here.


 This post also features the late and great Seamus Heaney's poem the Rainstick which I've added below and I've added a link: Click here, for a fresh article on Heaney from Thinking Faith, the Online Journal of The British Jesuits, by Edel McClean, who pays tribute to the life and work of a man whose death, according to his fellow poet, Don Paterson, ‘seems to have left a breach in the language itself’.

The Rainstick

Up-end the 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;

The glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.

Up-end the stick again. What happens next



Is undiminished for having happened once,

Twice, ten, and 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. 


and that in turn leads me to one of my favourite pieces of music,
Gabriel's Oboe from the 1986 film The Mission 
 



Here's the complete and so utterly sublime version of  Ennio Morricone's Gabriel's Oboe and The Falls played by Yo-Yo Ma





The Persian poet Rumi gave us a wise saying 
“Not only the thirsty seek the water, the water as well seeks the thirsty.”



                                          
 Wittgenstein said that “The world we live in is the words we use.”
So it's also a timely day to reflect on that too and how I might take more care of the way I choose language to express myself.

 Click here for Digital Nun's reflection at i-Benedictines on poetry and the decline of civilisation.
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