On Being Water Poem by Michael Carrier

This poem starts with a quote: 'Water can flow, and it can crash'- Bruce Lee

You dodge me like assassins bullets not knowing whether I will nourish your gardens or flood you for forty nights.

The Greeks call me Poseidon, the Americans- Katrina.

I am both the dam breaker and the hands that cup floating lilies.

Both the hurricane and what cools the rushing lava.

The color of storms in your lover's eyes.

No levy can be built strong enough to even withstand even my glance.

Yet when your skin is still fluid and your eyes not yet formed, I rock you to sleep even where the hands of your mother cannot touch you.
Where you promised to return to me when you die, can you remember that promise?

Amongst the crashing flags as you fight to contain me in your borders.

Trying to manipulate my ebb and flow as if you were God's yourselves.

Damn your neighbor, Let him thirst.

You harvest my body as if I grew from earth and did not make the earth grow.

You demand for me to be pure as you pour poisons into me.

Elijah.

Once lit me on fire as a miracle of God, but now my rivers are so polluted you could ignite my surface with a dropped match.

A man sweats me from his brow as he unlocks me from under sand, while across the world a girl on ecstasy drinks me in buckets and drowns.

Who cries for this inequality? Who cries for spilled water?

I am more precious than oil, yet you squander me by the half full bottle.

Never paid me attention in Georgia until you had to pray for my return.

I am like sacks of coins you squabble over though never worship.

Though you would never trade your lush soil for the barren heat of Africa's Horn.

Never pour out the cup that runnith over into the dust.

So when I am no longer clean, when I gum the fish's gills and it rains poison, who will nourish your children? Who will run through your branching veins to swell your thirsty heart? What will plump your fields and cattle?

As you unlock me by the icecap will you know when my love note to life turns into a death threat?

Will you curse the rising tides that drown Manhattan as my oceans catch fire and the moon pulls waves of flame to devour the shore, would you fear me? Would you pray for me then?

When the well runs dry, civilization cannot be sustained on tears alone.

Imagine standing on the coastline watching burning birds take flight then hit the air as ash.


By: Billy Tuggle