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Rain QUOTES

Rain QUOTES

1 " While you spoke, it reached into the room 
switching off the mirrors in their frames 
and undeveloping your photographs;
it gently drew a knife across the threads
that tied your keepsakes to the things they kept "

― Don Paterson , Rain

2 " My boy is painting outer space,
and steadies his brush-tip to trace
the comets, planets, moon and sun
and all the circuitry they run

in one great heavenly design.
But when he tries to close the line
he draws around his upturned cup,
his hand shakes, and he screws it up.

The shake’s as old as he is, all
(thank god) his body can recall
of the hour when, one inch from home,
we couldn’t get the air to him;

and though today he’s all the earth
and sky for breathing-space and breath
the whole damn troposphere can’t cure
the flutter in his signature.

But Jamie, nothing’s what we meant.
The dream is taxed. We all resent
the quarter bled off by the dark
between the bowstring and the mark

and trust to Krishna or to fate
to keep our arrows halfway straight.
But the target also draws our aim -
our will and nature’s are the same;

we are its living word, and not
a book it wrote and then forgot,
its fourteen-billion-year-old song
inscribed in both our right and wrong -

so even when you rage and moan
and bring your fist down like a stone
on your spoiled work and useless kit,
you just can’t help but broadcast it:

look at the little avatar
of your muddy water-jar
filling with the perfect ring
singing under everything. "

― Don Paterson , Rain

3 " forget the ink, the milk, the blood -
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain's own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters. "

― Don Paterson , Rain