And it stoned me, to my soul…

The Rainbow
by Millen Brand
Excerpted from Local Lives: Poems About the Pennsylvania Dutch, ©1975

Herbert Berky tells this story:
When he was a boy, he used to work
in two hill fields Josephus Gerhard
had given his father.
“You went up a lane that started
between the Borneman place and Uncle John’s,
and made a left turn past a tenant house,
and then up past Mommy Stauffer’s.”
She was married
to his great-uncle Andros
and “there were some special springs there
and we always stopped to have a drink.”
Beyond Mommy’s were the two fields.
One day he was working “in the onion patch,”
when in a nearby field
down the hill slope at an angle
a neighbor named Stengel
came plowing with a two-horse plow.
Just then a shower
traveled lightly over the valley
and there was “a most beautiful bow.
I had always thought bows were far away,
but when Stengel that day came
to where the end of the bow was,
he and the horses went right through it.
The colors washed right over team and man.”

 

And that reminded me of this:

Full lyrics HERE.

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• Posted in: Music ♦ Poetry ♦ Spirituality
• Tagged: Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, music, poetry, Spirituality