Water

 At Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads, you saw "Water 7-10" and then "Water 1-6."  Here is the revised and united poem "Water" exposed first at Poetry United: Poetry Pantry #107 and then at its birthplace for "Open Link Monday."

Water

 

"Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink."**

1

We cupped our hands for spring water to chill

2

Children splashed everywhere, knee high, hands free--

puddle, pool, spring, stream, river, tub and sea

3

Steel pots and pails, glazed cups and cowboy hats

displaced the coopers trade so “there’s a hole

in my bucket” lost its tune to the times

4

Mom and I found blue glass and bell jars

in the landfill behind grandmother’s shed,

washed them in the sink, lined them up on sills

to catch sun—I cannot go back there alone

5

We love; we wash each other in showers

the wash basin gone the way of the wringer,

the clothes lines, and the garden watering

one bucket after another then filled

with beans and snap peas and tomatoes

6

We lavish in each other’s love, waste daylight,

taste moon tides, sculpt face masks with petals,

race bicycles, play scrabble, drink coffee,

gamble candles and horsepower for love

dancing here, sleeping there and waking up

at last to hear of wars and scarcities

7

We sip from plastic bottles at our campfire

joking semi-earnestly that we hold the solution

to scarcity of water in our hands: making,

filling, shipping, distributing, hoarding

and profiting by what we take so easily

from our market-supplied packs—

spring water, artesian water, distilled water.

8

We name instances, a game, a fun contest

to  name and to be able to judge: the revenge

of Montezuma in Mexico; the drought in Ethiopia,

Near and Far East and elsewhere in Africa

and the Americas, droughts everywhere;

flood-floated poisons and fracking run-offs;

and the ancient mariner’s penance, the waste

land's thunder and the dust bowl's wrath.

9

Who wins?  You ask, pulling yourself from play,

entering your om shanti shanti shanti, thus

removing obstacles to peace and understanding,

thus resolving yourself of my company—still

in worn blue jeans, red corduroy shirt,  bandana,

and cap, you mix other worldly metaphors

to pour a libation on mother earth, crumple

your empty with crackle of lightening, and bury

it in your army fatigue pack, out of sight and mind

10

I want to win; I always do—so I crumple mine too,

pull out my journal, and record by the light of the fire

and the Light of you that we are the dunghills we make
and cannot rise above their mist, that we have been Job
and now must be able to rise to shovel our way out
along with our neighbors, to bend our words from swords
into plowshares AND pipe lines to . . . oh . . . I don’t know!
To season my thoughts into thunder, I fall back on the green moss,
place my hand on your damp libation; look up to the stars,
breathe and sigh.    I want to cry, but I don't.

**from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

                          by  Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

Other places I visited  include:  The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, "The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot, "Upon the Burning of our House" by Anne Bradstreet, Lady Windermere's Fan (Act III) by Oscar Wilde, and the Bible. 

Copyright © 2012 S.L.Chast

Submitted to Apiary