Song of Water

Stamp Falls

by Dan Aman Photography

Water falls as snow,
draping the world in beauty,
softening the hard edges,
hiding the detritus of man-made existence
under a coverlet of pristine perfection,
a mask that hides a thousand man-made wounds,
and a million of humanity's clamoring needs.

If I were a river,
truth would be my song.
I'd roar through rock-walled chasms,
green with weeping,
crash over rocks of resistance,
find my way
through decades of wrong turnings
to the ocean of well-being,
if it took a century
of tribulation,
for that one final moment
of immersion
where my soul belonged.

Water is alive.
Its cells respond to positive and negative,
to love, to anger,
to fear, to distress.
When the Black Snake spills
into its rippling depths,
you cannot hear its anguished screams,
but the dying fish and strangled birds,
the oil-drenched river otters, the grounded swans,
the bears and eagles who have
no fish to eat or water to drink,
join in its song of death.


for Elizabeth Crawford's challenge: Water. I snuck in yesterday's word (Mask) as well. I'm sneaky like that. Smiles. Shared with the Poetry Pantry at  Poets United  and the Tuesday Platform at Real Toads.