A Dance for Rain

Listen to:

A Dance for Rain (4:25)

by Witter Bynner 

performed by Bob Gonzalez, rhapsode

Used with permission from The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry,
which retains full rights to the text of this poem. 

Painting "Embers" by Tony Abeyta. 

http://www.tonyabeyta.com/

You may never see rain, unless you see

A dance for rain at Cochiti,

Never hear thunder in the air

Unless you hear the thunder there,

Nor know the lightning in the sky

If there’s no pole to know it by …

They dipped the pole just as I came,

And I can never be the same

Since this feathers gave my brow

The touch of wind that’s on it now,

Bringing over the arid lands

Butterfly gestures from Hopi hands

And holding me, till earth shall fail,

As close to earth as a fox’s tail.

I saw them, naked, dance in line 

Before the candles of a leafy shrine;

Before a saint in a Christian dress

I saw them dance their holiness,

I saw them reminding him all day long

That death is weak and life is strong

And urging the fertile earth to yield

Seed from the loin and seed from the field.

A feather in the hair and a shell at the throat

Were lifting and falling with every note

Of the chorus-voices and the drum,

Calling for the rain to come.

A fox on the back, and shaken on the thigh

Rain cloth woven from the sky,

And under the knee a turtle-rattle

Clacking with the toes of sheep and cattle —

These were the men, their bodies painted

Earthen, with a white rain slanted;

These were the men, a windy line,

Their elbows green with a growth of pine.

And in among them, close and slow,

Women moved the way things grow,

With a mesa-tablet on the head

And a little grassy creeping tread

And with sprays of pine moved back and forth,

While the dance of the men blew from the north,

Blew from the south and east and west

Over the field and over the breast.

And the heart was beating in the drum.

Beating for the rain to come.

Dead men out of earlier lives,

Leaving their graves, leaving their wives,

Were partly flesh and partly clay,

And their heads were corn that was dry and gray.

They were ghosts of men and once again

They were dancing like a ghost of rain;

For the spirits of men, the more they eat,

Have happier hands and lighter feet,

And the better they dance the better they know

How to make corn and children grow.

And so in Cochiti that day

They slowly put the sun away

And they made a cloud and they made it break

And they made it rain for the children’s sake.

And they never stopped the song or the drum

Pounding for the rain to come.

The rain made many suns to shine,

Golden bodies in a line

With leaping feather and swaying pine.

And the brighter the bodies, the brighter the rain

As thunder heaped it on the plain.

Arroyos had been empty, dry,

But now were running with the sky;

And the dancers’ feet were in a lake,

Dancing for the people’s sake.

And the hands of a ghost had made a cup

For scooping handfuls of water up;

And he poured it into a ghostly throat,

And he leaped and waved with every note

Of the dancers’ feet and the songs of the drum

That had called the rain and made it come.

For this was not a god of wood,

This was a god whose touch was good,

You could lie down in him and roll

And wet your body and wet your soul;

For this was not a god in a book,

This was a god that you tasted and took

Into a cup that you made with your hands,

Into your children and into your lands —

This was a god that you could see,

Rain, rain in Cochiti!