Wednesday, July 26, 2006


WHAT WAS THAT?


Woke up startled this morning and wasn't quite sure why; there was something about the atmosphere... something about the air... the environment... the... an intangible something I couldn't quite identify was floating unnamed in my dawning consciousness, like a word I used to know, the sound of it or the meaning... maybe the edge of a song, the color of a name, a voice from long ago... it hovered just beyond the reach of my... ear. My ear?

Then it came to me and all at once I knew, as surely as one knows there's no more beer: it wasn't raining! The sudden cessation of constantly cascading water from an overloaded sky onto a sodden earth had ceased, and the abrupt forestwide blast of noiselessness had awakened me like a cannon going off in my doorway. I could hear birds out in the rainlessness, a lot of nonplussed chirping! I noted the quizzical tones of cicadas savoring the new phenomenon of initial dryness and the absence of competing white noise! New harmonies burgeoned!

Then I saw something odd among the leaves of the trees outside, that was also falling on the floor, then the walls, it was gold; no, it was warm and insubstantial, it was sunshine! I remember sunshine from when I was a kid, and here it was again!

Then more clouds came and it started re-raining so I went back to sleep.

6 comments:

Joy Des Jardins said...

Oh Noah...but for a moment...

If you must build, you will need to be nourished by whatever sleep and the meager remains the beasts leave to you.

Maya's Granny said...

Know the feeling well. Is your part of Japan a rain forest, as my part of Alaska is? Young children here see blue sky and it frightens them.

Chancy said...

Darn it.

Mother Nature, stop being nasty to Robert.

Anonymous said...

Hmmnn...just read your blurb in Ode Magazine....the lightening bolt of stapled paper that has re-awakened my faith in all things life-driven and positive for a change...which brought me here to your personal spillings that again made me feel 'at home' somehow. Love the way you make up your own words....my favorite way of scratching my own feelings/thoughts from pen to paper regardless of whether it's 'correct' in any way, shape or form. Anyway....am new here so will leave you with a silly poem I wrote when I was 16....just because I can..lol.
A Poem

A poem is an echo of a

feeling or a thought

How loud a feeling sounds

when committed to the pen

It reaches out to touch

then bounces back again.

Sue Tait '68

Anonymous said...

When you first awoke, did you bang the side of your head thinking your ears were full of water?

Robert Brady said...

Thanks for the commiseration, folks; the sun prevailed today at last (though I was in the office). And thanks for the poem, Sue. (BTW, which issue of Ode was that? they never sent me a copy, the cads.)