It's World Water Day on Monday 22nd March apparently...and over here you can read about proper serious scientific events being held in Dundee on that day (organised by the UNESCO Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science). They want to link to poems about water so...what have you got? If you post a watery poem on your blog and link to their page (as above) they will link to you in return (if you send your link to this email).
So, here are a couple of my watery offerings...first here's one I posted back here in 2008 as part of my Fridge Magnet Poetry project:
Nature falls
Why here, why now
Does it rain like future?
Our grey old present
An eternity lake
We ache and sweat
How wet, how bitter
We rust like drunks
Supped up, fit to break
RF 2008
Then there's a fairly old one about the simple things (water included):
Simple stuff
Stream rushing down the hillside
Cool, clean and with direction
How I would like to be you
Not dazed, not lost, not sad
Too murky to mention
Not hopelessly, stupidly
Stumbling through
Tree growing tall in woodland
Strong, useful, admirable too
How I would like to be you
Not pathetic or rattled
By a host of minor phobic complaints
Not rootless
No let's hear it for roots
For without them what is there
To remain true to?
Sand collected down on the shoreline
Intricate, simple, the best of extremes
Oh how very much I would like to be you
Broken but whole, moving but still
Dead but so very busy still being around
The answers I crave
I see them in you
RF 2005
Finally here's a little one I wrote years ago...long before I lived near to the sea:
Flat good
I have a picture
Of the sea
It has a calming
Effect on me
This is no small feat
Not small at all
For one so flat
And hung on a wall
RF years ago
So what have you got water-wise? Sorlil, you should have enough to last us till Xmas, no?
p.s. Today's photo was the view from our upstairs window back when we lived in Auchmithie. It was taken in 2002. I miss that view!
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19 comments:
Oh, I like these, particularly the last verse of "Nature Falls" and all of "Flat Good".
I do not have a single watery poem in my canon, but Happy World Water Day anyway!
I think I'm more likely to have a cannon than a canon...
And hold off on those felicitations...it's not till 22nd March!
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In that last thirty years I’ve written three poems including the word ‘water’: in one someone’s struggling in it, in another someone’s making a cuppa with it and in the last it’s a simile for pain. It’s also from that poem I get the title of my blog:
I think pain’s like water
like the chill of the moment
like the birth pangs of poems
and the truth about lies
is we can’t live without them.
Not even the white ones.
from ‘Old Flames in the Rain’
Lord, you're so previous! Never read the date, straight to the poems, me.
Nice one Jim.
Well, I didn't really want people to post their poems in the box here...(instructions? Pay attention at the back!)
But I don't suppose it really matters.
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Thanks Rachel. I've posted mine, and I'm about to make the links.
Colin
Now, see that's the way to do it!
Smasher of a poem, Colin. I think that will be just up their...stream.
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Can't believe you had to move away from that view! Ah well - least you still have the picture... It's a gorgeous day for water here, blue sky for once and your poems make me really really want to be at the beach now!!!
word verification is coest
Yes, we had that view for 2 years. We always knew it was going to be temporary (our stay in that particular house) but it was great while it lasted. I didn't get much work of any kind done there while we lived there though...too busy staring out of the window!
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And of course that was the summer version of the view...
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Ha! I really like Flat Good, very nice and succinct. It'll be hard for me to pick a poem, do I have any that are not about water??
I do have a soft spot for that little poem. It always makes me think of the odd linguistic details we learn at school...pictures are hung, people are hanged!
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I would miss that view too!
I don't think I have a poem about water which is a bit remiss, it being the stuff of life and all.
You had one about water just the other day, didn't you? The first one you posted?
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I love the last one best. Brings to mind many memories of looking at vacation photos [we went to the beach every year]. I could look at them and smell the salty air, hear the surf.
Thanks for bringing it back again.
'We rust like drunks' Ooh I like that, the whole poem in fact.In even more fact I like all of them, feel the sadness.
Glad you like that one Hope...it is a very old poem...like looking at an old photo now in a way.
Sadness, TFE..? It seeps in everywhere it seems...
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Simple Stuff is simply fantastic.
The chap who made the BBC Solar System programme (Sun 9pm) was on the radio today talking about the significance of water. Sounded interesting.
Thanks Dominic. I guess 'Simple stuff' shows why I don't find the poem from two posts ago ('Or infinity') scary (as some others did).
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