A former college roommate of Neil Diamond has stepped forward with a quietly charming story from their student years — a ritual the singer practiced long before fame found him. According to the roommate, whenever it rained on campus, Diamond would write short poems on scrap paper and tape them around the dorm hallways for anyone to find.
The roommate says the tradition began unexpectedly during their first semester. One afternoon, heavy rain hammered against the dorm windows, the kind that made the building hum and the hallways feel unusually dim. While most students retreated into their rooms to study or sleep, Diamond sat at his desk, scribbling lines in pencil onto torn notebook pages.
“He wasn’t doing it for attention,” the roommate recalled. “He wasn’t performing. It was just something the rain pulled out of him.”
The poems were never more than a few lines — sometimes reflective, sometimes playful. One early piece reportedly read: “Some days the sky sings / and all we can do is listen.” Another, taped near the stairwell, said simply: “Rain feels honest.”
Diamond would quietly step into the hallway, find an empty stretch of wall, and tape the poem at eye level. He did this on every floor, moving with the calm, steady rhythm of someone completing a personal task. Most students didn’t know who wrote the messages at first. The notes appeared mysteriously, always on rainy days, offering unexpected moments of reflection between classes and cafeteria trips.
“There was something soothing about it,” the roommate said. “You’d hear the rain outside, feel the chill in the hallway, and then see a handwritten poem taped to the wall. It softened the whole building.”
The ritual continued throughout their years in the dorms. Even during stressful weeks — midterms, finals, and the chaotic stretch right before winter break — the rain triggered the same response. Diamond would pull out whatever paper he had: torn envelopes, class notes, even the back of a dining hall menu.
He never asked for feedback. He never checked whether people liked them. He simply wrote, posted, and returned to his room. Some students began collecting the poems, taking them down and pinning them above their desks. Others left them untouched, treating them like part of the building’s weather — something that arrived and faded naturally.
The roommate remembers one particular storm when the rain was so intense it flooded parts of the courtyard. Students gathered by the windows, watching water pool across the pavement. In the middle of it, Diamond quietly taped a poem next to the elevator: “Every storm leaves something behind. Make space for it.”
By then, everyone knew who the poet was.
“It wasn’t dramatic,” the roommate said. “He didn’t want credit. He just wanted to offer a thought — something to match the mood outside.”
The notes became a beloved quirk of the dorm’s culture. Even after Diamond moved to off-campus housing, new students asked about the “rain poems,” wondering if the tradition would continue. It didn’t, but the stories remained.
Decades later, the roommate still keeps one of the originals tucked inside a book — a tiny square of lined paper with a few penciled words fading at the edges. A small reminder of a rainy day, a quiet hallway, and a young songwriter who processed storms by putting gentle thoughts on the wall.