Water

This month I am taking part in NaPoWriMo, National Poetry Writing Month. The aim is to write a poem every day for thirty days. I know lots of people haven’t signed up here to get political poems and experimental wordplay, so I am not posting them here, occasionally a poem comes up that is relevant to Wizard News. For those of you who are interested, my Napowrimo poems 2017 will be put here. Eventually, I want this page to be a showcase for poets and storytellers who are writing from, or about Avalon and Glastonbury UK – so if that is something you are into, please follow AvalonVox.

This poem was inspired by a prompt from day five, to write about a natural feature that you know well. I thought you might like it.

Water has memory.
I thought it would remember me.
But why should it?
My insignificant brevity
in dedication to its purity
is just a drop in its millennial flow.

People come and go,
filling their bottles,
quenching their thirst,
tying their clooties so well.
In my memory,
restoring,
sacred space,
a temple,
‘For the Love of It’
I remember it well.

Swift flows of remembrance
when ‘Welcome home,’
trembles through the bones
because well, here you are!
Home.

People come and go,
filling their bottles,
quenching their thirst,
tying their clooties so well.
sharing a story,
a prayer,
a ritual,
or worse,
loud angsty rants.
I remember it well.

Velvet strips of remembrance
a swift tease by candlelight
reflecting times passing
where stone trembles
with tribal shouts of grieving.

People come and go,
filling their bottles,
quenching their thirst,
tying their clooties so well.
riding through history
a chance
to heal
disease,
a miracle cure.
I remember it well.

1539, when the Last Abbot was done in,
and the Abbey dismembered,
here they cleaned the bloody tools,
that’s worth remembering.

1751, a gentleman’s magazine states,
‘ten thousand people drink for healing.’
The Mayor of Glastonbury reports,
Matt Chancellor endorses the healing waters.
And so increases its fame.

1872, George Wright writes
of pretty caverns clothed with moss,
fairy dropping wells on Well House Lane
before the Wellhouse was built to contain the water
and pump into town the cure for cholera.
And what was Glastonbury like then?
I remember it well.

Still, the flow keeps flowing
and people keep showing up
with their love for the gift
that pure water gives.
Feeling uplifted,
many lives lived, many lives taken.
promises made,
broken and unbroken,
rites of passage softly spoken,
misunderstood intentions,
machinations and inventions,
and mistaken prophecies,
does it remember all of these?

Does it rise up in remembrance of every story?
If you froze one drop for a moment
and magnified it a million times,
would it form into symmetrical shapes of love
or twist around in agony?
Surely it remembers both sides of the story.
It doesn’t remember me,
it just goes with the flow while
people come and go,
filling their bottles,
quenching their thirst and
tying their clooties so well.