The poet Seamus Heaney died this week. NPR ran an old interview and Heaney spoke about the home he grew up in as a child. He described how the railroad tracks ran by his house and the telegraph wires too. He and his friends used to watch as the raindrops gathered on the wires and in the magical way of childhood they imagined other possibilities.
In the poem "The Railway Children," Heaney wrote, "We thought words traveled the wires/in the shiny pouches of raindrops/Each one seeded full with the light/Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves/So infinitesimally scaled/We could stream through the eye of a needle."
On a morning walk today, I stopped to watch the raindrops gather on the wild beach roses, the skinny green stalks and pale leaves. And as a misty rain continued to fall on this Labor Day picnic day, I had to smile.
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