The first rain after months of drought arrives as a small reprieve, not a rescue. Risa Bear’s “And Now It Sings” follows a woman on a farm through the end of a punishing dry season and into a moment of fragile, almost accidental hope. The poem works by intimate observation: a split-bamboo hat shedding water, the memory of “sun, sun, sun,” and finally a goldfinch whose sudden song seems to release the whole landscape from silence. Its central idea is not that hardship is over—the poem is explicit that the rain will not refill the well or start the creek—but that life can answer deprivation with a small, unforced affirmation.
Bear builds the poem as a single, heavily enjambed stretch of free verse, so the eye and ear keep moving through the damage. There is no regular rhyme, but sound patterns do the work of rhyme: “drips rolling” gives way to “thirsting clay,” and later “cracked” and “lost heart” echo the earlier “lip-cracking and tree-splitting.” The repeated word “sun, sun, sun” reproduces the monotony of months without change. That repetition, followed by “Nothing had been vernal about it,” turns the spring equinox into a hollow marker of time. The word “vernal” normally promises greenness, but here it arrives only to be negated.
The imagery moves from the woman to the land and then through the whole web of the farm. The fir limbs “sulked”; willows “browned up and died.” Birds are not merely quiet but “fell everlastingly silent,” a phrase that makes silence itself feel like a fall. Fish crowd into shrinking pools “fin by fin,” the phrase almost tender, until they “roll over” and bump downstream “stinking.” Even the crops are called “miniaturized”—an unusually technical word that captures how the plants have survived but at a reduced, economically useless scale. The lingering detail of morning glories vining into the “cracked farm” is important: they are often weeds, but they also suggest beauty entering only after the woman has “lost heart.” The farm’s cracks are not just in the soil.
The shift comes with the phrase “And now here / comes weather.” The line break isolates “here,” giving it the force of an event. Yet Bear is careful not to overstate. The rain is “not enough to top off the well, / maybe, and certainly not enough to start the creek.” That refusal of easy resolution is what makes the ending earned. The woman stops, “catching chill,” and watches a goldfinch with a twist of thistledown. The bird drops the food, opens its beak, “cranes skyward.” The posture is not just physical; it is a kind of praise or need. Then the last sentence, “And now it sings,” completes the title and reverses the earlier silence of falling birds.
What makes the poem significant is its insistence on the partial. It does not claim the drought is healed, the farm saved, or the woman restored. It claims only that after long loss, a creature can still choose food, air, and song. The goldfinch’s thistledown is foraged, not given; the song is small against a season of death. But in the poem’s logic, small is not nothing. The first wetness, the woman’s stillness, and the bird’s open beak form a chain of attention. That attention is the real change: after months in which the land “knew” only dryness, someone is again present enough to hear a song.