Rain Barrel: An Original Poem

I began working on a poem late last night/early this morning to post for Poetry Friday—but I didn’t have time to finish it. So…I pulled out Rain Barrel, a poem from A Home for the Seasons, an unpublished collection of memoir poems that I wrote many years ago. The poems in the collection relate the experiences and happy times I had at the home of my maternal grandparents.

My “Dzidzi”—grandfather—truly had a green thumb. He loved working in his vegetable garden in summer. He kept a big wooden barrel for collecting rain water next to the cellar door. The “we” in the following poem refers to me and my two cousins. My cousins—both girls—lived in the duplex that my grandparents owned. The three of us spent much of our childhood together.


Rain Barrel
by Elaine Magliaro


Beside the cellar door

stands Dzidzi’s rain barrel.

Deep brown as the earth itself,

it seems rooted in the ground.

In it Dzidzi captures the melting sky

he waters garden flowers with.

We plunge our small tin watering cans

deep into Dzidzi’s wooden well

and pull them out full of fallen rain

we shower over the brown-faced sunflower,

bright pink peonies, and puffy white snowballs.

On sticky summer days, we splash

our arms and faces in its coolness.

And sometimes, alone in the backyard,

I stare down into its dark liquid universe

as if looking for a lost star

that has fallen there.

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My poetic contribution at Political Verses this week is Bah Humbug Exercise: A Poem That Could Have Written by Rush Limbaugh.

At Blue Rose Girls, I have a post about my writer’s block, a poem about poetry, and a link to Poems about Poems: Why Not?, an article by Katha Pollitt at The Nation website.

Tricia has the Poetry Friday Roundup at the Miss Rumphius Effect.