Meadow dry dust and bone brown listens with its mouths and ears of mouse holes and cricket holes round ‘o’s of wonderment for the stalk-rattle shaman-drumming pounding of hooves tastes grass stalks lolling the far-away ocean tang of rain.
Last night we finally had proper, heavy rain. Not for long, but enough to raise the spirits of the vegetation that wasn’t already dead. It’s warm now, gentle, and the tension has dropped. We walked out in it, the first shower, and watched the toads climb out of the ditches, and the carpet of snails sprung from nowhere. There are even tiny toadlets, though I have no idea how they survived the trek up the baking desert of the meadow. Nature is resilient. I hope, resilient enough.
Rain
There was rain and the smell of earth-sigh, the patter or water and a trickle running along the dry stream bed.
There were snails and toads and owl choruses, and our feet tripped along the lane beneath a pale moon,
as we listened to the wind from the ocean, running its fingers through the hair of the trees, whispering, Here is rain.
House sits within its moat of rain water where the salamander lives and running grass green and the cowshed where the toad swims under the door and the veil of raindrops dripping from the eaves dripping in the attic and inside the windows and the places where it bubbles up through the floor.
House sits full of the smell of water cool and cold and we listen to the patter on glass the rattle down chimneys feel the stones slip into some other world of water and watery things.
Night is deep and well-dark ditch-full of rain and the crow wind and when the light returns in the grass running down the green path water-running will be the ragged ghostly procession of white agaric water-gorged and tasteless.
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