Circling Water

Moving air
breathes tongues of cloud
through heaven’s open mouth;

    and licks the salt waves dry.
Nimbostratus
slides east into mist,
over the upswept hills, rain on the leading edge;

    grey slate-pencils, rewritten sky.

Placeless drizzle
in the supine glens
drenches moss and blanket bog;

    the thin peat drowns in its perpetual falling.

Deer-grass
bends in the hollows
where heather discards its shadows

    and pools of light hold the sky captive, still, in the reed beds.

Unseen springs
run deep in gullies,
singing over the stones:

    the liquid music of water returning.

Water waits,
as lengthening distance,
slips its away through forest and field,

    easing the river as it writes the history of rain.

Always circling,
beginning and ending,
curvature and imagined horizons,

    wind on the sea, its uninterrupted blowing.

© BH, 2020

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I had the idea of writing something around the water cycle. And I did. Lots of words… This was a poem that required substantial hatchet work. I had written a block of stone that needed chiselling into shape. So be it, I thought, and chiselled.

This was the result.