music

Summoning Rain

~ shoreacres ~ 47 Comments
Liberian rain stick and tribal masks

Across cultures, from Australia to Argentina to Mexico to Tibet, the rainstick serves as a musical instrument, a necessary adjunct to tribal ceremonies, and a means of calling up rain.  My own rainstick comes from Liberia, West Africa, where I worked for a few years. Unlike those made from dried cacti and filled with beads or seeds, mine was formed from a stalk of a different sort of plant; I’ve always assumed its sound depends on falling rice or seeds.

Some say rainsticks are magical. Whether that’s true I can’t say, but now and then I ponder my stick’s survival for nearly fifty years in the heat and humidity of both Liberia and Texas. Occasionally I turn it as I walk by, and find myself transported back the bush: hearing again the sound of approaching rain. Sometimes, if long anticipated and much needed rain is in the forecast, I turn the stick several times, hoping the magic is real.

Seamus Heaney, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet known for works exalting everyday miracles, has considered the rain stick. His poem celebrating its qualities was published in The New Republic in 1993; its words still fall on the ear as easily as the sound of coming rain.

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.

 

Comments always are welcome.

Those Wonderful Christmas Toys

~ shoreacres ~ 63 Comments

I suppose everyone remembers a special Christmas gift or two, and this was one of mine. While not precisely a toy, this Steelman record player served me well for several years. According to a 1950 issue of Billboard, the Steelman Phonograph and Radio Company, based in Mt. Vernon, New York, had begun producing three versions of its portable, luggage-type record changer in that year, including this three-speed version in a leatherette case. My parents splurged a bit; the player was priced at $29.95.

I remember the case, although at the time I paid no attention to the Steelman name inside the cover. In 1950, I was four years old, reading well enough to be following lyrics, and falling in love with my ‘music machine.’

Today, music machines have changed a good bit, but one of my favorites requires neither AC current nor batteries. While there aren’t any lyrics to follow, it hardly matters. The sight of the sound of this ‘toy’ is enough.


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The Arts of Spring

~ shoreacres ~ 59 Comments
Rockport, Texas City Cemetery ~ March 7

 

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.
I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze.
And I, what fountain of fire am I among
This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed
About like a shadow buffeted in the throng
Of flames, a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.
                                      “The Enkindled Spring”  ~  D.H. Lawrence

 

 

 

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