Ed Higgins
Rain Song
“Rich showering rain and recompense richer afterward.”
—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Feelin’, feelin’ good, down-fallin’ down
rain, rain, rain came today,
wet alfresco alchemy,
welcome in my dry-so-long brain.
Walkin’ through drip thick sound
crushed, splayed cloud thickets––
even irony washing by rivers full
out of my gray desert head.
Over the dripping haze days
of my dry now-again-alive those
until otherwise arid skin-and-bones
burdens flushed clean as wild-a-way.
Rained, to this season’s dense roots
I rise, rise, surprised anew. A new fluid
song in some druid-ancient oak trunk,
or my garden’s favorite yellow rose.
Or better watered yet, Walt’s own wit
witness of green goings-on. Washed down
leaves of all-again we’re forever grass:
with life rising, risen from it.
Ed Higgins: My poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals including: Monkeybicycle, Tattoo Highway, Word Riot, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Blue Print Review, among others. My wife and I live on a small farm in Yamhill, OR, raising a menagerie of animals including two whippets, a manx barn cat (who doesn’t care for the whippets), two Bourbon Red turkeys (King Strut and Nefra-Turkey), and an alpaca named Machu-Picchu. I teach literature at George Fox University, south of Portland, OR. I’m also Asst. Fiction Editor for Brilliant Flash Fiction, an Ireland-based flash journal.
Rain Song
“Rich showering rain and recompense richer afterward.”
—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Feelin’, feelin’ good, down-fallin’ down
rain, rain, rain came today,
wet alfresco alchemy,
welcome in my dry-so-long brain.
Walkin’ through drip thick sound
crushed, splayed cloud thickets––
even irony washing by rivers full
out of my gray desert head.
Over the dripping haze days
of my dry now-again-alive those
until otherwise arid skin-and-bones
burdens flushed clean as wild-a-way.
Rained, to this season’s dense roots
I rise, rise, surprised anew. A new fluid
song in some druid-ancient oak trunk,
or my garden’s favorite yellow rose.
Or better watered yet, Walt’s own wit
witness of green goings-on. Washed down
leaves of all-again we’re forever grass:
with life rising, risen from it.
Ed Higgins: My poems and short fiction have appeared in various print and online journals including: Monkeybicycle, Tattoo Highway, Word Riot, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Blue Print Review, among others. My wife and I live on a small farm in Yamhill, OR, raising a menagerie of animals including two whippets, a manx barn cat (who doesn’t care for the whippets), two Bourbon Red turkeys (King Strut and Nefra-Turkey), and an alpaca named Machu-Picchu. I teach literature at George Fox University, south of Portland, OR. I’m also Asst. Fiction Editor for Brilliant Flash Fiction, an Ireland-based flash journal.