For all of us who have explored something new with a child for the first time and shared the awe and wonder with them.

The Rain Stick

for Beth and Rand

Upend the rain 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;

Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.

Upend the stick again. What happens next

Is undiminished for having happened once,

Twice, ten a 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. 

by Seamus Heaney. Included in his collection of poems The Spirit Level (1996).