The rain, though lacking will, must have its way
and drizzles steadily from lidding cloud;
from the grey morning to the gloaming shroud
cascades of drips through yielding leaf-palms spray
down through tree tenements, splatter their say
and fling on kitchen windows an opal crowd,
rivulet tear-streams till I sigh aloud,
giving the fallacy a role to play.
You say it's there though no one watches it,
and what of that? It's always witnessing
we bring to make of nature a green stream
a song sung lullaby, remembering
how we sheltered by the Dee,
rain-drips fit
into the selving jigsaw of a dream.
.........................
It's an Italian sonnet.
The opal, in question in line six, is the white opal (with the rainbow within it) that UK is more used to, rather than the multicolored kinds in Australia, for example.
By the river Dee (the one in Yorkshire, or Cumbria, I assume, since there are quite a few river Dees in the UK) I was rising five and with my mother, father and two sisters (two in those days, three thereafter) under some trees with the rain falling on our faces, on our waterproofs and soaking down our legs. The river was bubbling and chain-ringed alive with the rain and the swirls and whorls and minnows swam in the gravel shallow in shoals just beyond our reaching fingers. I made up a song with my middle sister - showing an instinct for Animism -
There's a Din man in the river;
There's a Din man in the sea;
There's a Din man in the ocean,
And his name is Little Din Dee.
(My mother called us Din people because we made such a din.)
If you've seen this story before below another of my poems, it's because I am getting to be a fond old josser.
