On reading Heaney’s ‘Gifts of Rain’

The recent rain has left puddles,
cars shower walkers with chilly waves
and tractors churn up mud.

Burst riverbanks leave us in a muddle,
fields and gardens lost, animals to save,
as we wrangle with the flood.

On the other side of the world it’s dry,
all moisture wrung out, no dripping taps,
just an arid cough of dust.

There’s not a raincloud in the burning sky,
crops wither, plants are drained of sap,
and soil is a hardened crust.

If we could send our cloudbursts
to those in dire need of gifts of rain,
we would miss our sense of weather,

the friendly grumbling about the first
topic of conversation, the plain in Spain
that brings British folk together.

Kim M. Russell, 31st October 2023

Image by John Noonan on Unsplash

It’s All Hallows Eve and Tuesday Poetics at the dVerse Poets Pub, where Dora from PilgrimDreams, our guest host, is in a bookish mood. She says that ‘though outside our doors little ghouls and ghosts may prowl to scare up tricks or treats, indoors we’re scaring up poetry written by the dead – dead poets, that is – in praise of books, books that have opened up whole new worlds and inspired the creation of countless others’.

She has shared examples of poems by famous dead poets who have written about poems by other dead poets; for example, John Keats composed a sonnet about how profoundly he was affected by reading a translation of Homer by the Elizabethan playwright George Chapman, and Milton wrote a poem ‘On Shakespeare’; and similar poems by Blake, Mary Shelley and Auden.

Our challenge is to choose a dead novelist or poet, one whom we have recently read or is simply a favourite, and write a poem on a work of theirs. After all the rain we’ve had lately, and my memories of the rain that fell in Ireland when I lived there, I chose to write my poem about Seamus Heaney’s ‘Gifts of Rain’, which you can find here.

I’m posting early as I’m visiting family this evening and will be back late, so I’ll be reading and commenting tomorrow morning.

38 thoughts on “On reading Heaney’s ‘Gifts of Rain’”

  1. Kim, Your love of Heaney’s poetry, his influence, comes shining through like a cloudburst after the rain. The last stanza has just that bit of colloquial humor that tops it all off. I so enjoyed this. Safe travels to and fro.

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  3. Oh I feel the ache of too much /too little in your poem, and also the heavy cloying mud that detains you “wranging with the flood”. That Heaney poem is new to me; thank you!

    Enjoy the magic of visiting your grandson and his family; may the “thin time” be blessed.

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  4. I love rain but not too much. A dry one is not good too. Love this part Kim:

    If we could send our cloudbursts
    to those in dire need of gifts of rain,
    we would miss our sense of weather,

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  9. Oh if we could only send cloudbursts, I’d say please send it here. It seems the world is out of balance in many ways right now. Lovely poem and here is yet another poet I will have to familiarise myself with. Thank you. 🙂

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  10. we’ve had lots of rain here too (midwest, USA), so it felt like you were talking to me! thanks for linking to the original poem that inspired you! enjoyed reading both yours and his!

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  12. I do wish we could send a few cloudbursts to areas that are in need of a bit of rain. It was a wet rainy Sunday and Monday here. Today, it’s just raw and cold. You have captured the gifts of rain beautifully.

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