Rain

Toward evening, as the light failed
and the pear tree at my window darkened,
I put down my book and stood at the open door,
the first raindrops gusting in the eaves,
a smell of wet clay in the wind.
Sixty years ago, lying beside my father,
half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain
drummed against our tent, I heard
for the first time a loon’s sudden wail
drifting across that remote lake—
a loneliness like no other,
though what I heard as inconsolable
may have been only the sound of something
untamed and nameless
singing itself to the wilderness around it
and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father
and of good companions gone
into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain
and the soft lapping of water, and did not know
whether it was grief or joy or something other
that surged against my heart
and held me listening there so long and late.

Peter Everwine


There is a surging in my heart, unnamed.
each day I ask it what it wants from me,
and every morning I wait for its answer.

I can not know if you have gone to a place
where you can understand, or even know what I feel.

That is part of the longing to go out now into the wilderness
with no way to know if you still can hear me.

my love grows and my understanding grows each day.

I pray to give you what you have given me.