Valley Road Poem by Kevin Goddard

When the floods came down again in ’06
And we rose, surprised children, to the wake
Of washed up roads, broken bridges, willows
Trunked as old secrets floating off
Down the river that was once Valley Road,
And that now hissed its way through
The green grass below our tenements,
We went then into the valley
Through the “yea though, yeah though”
That spilled off the lips of broken rock,
And fell down into the dark mouth
Of the sea,

Where we heard of the little girl lost,
Slipped in the slime upriver from
her mother’s arms and gone, down,
down, deep, we found, eventually,
into the shadows of our minds
caught in the hook of a tree
and plucked, a pink blossom
wrinkled and stained mudbrown,
a berry, someone else’s fruit
we thought, not ours, not
the wilderness work of our hands
alone – for once –
but some God’s, some slithering God’s.

And now the mother, rod beaten,
Staff measured, whose open mouth,
wider than a thousand seas, still swallows
the cries of her child, carries
the shadows of the valley curled up
Inside her, curled as the little
School boy in the park, dead
As a dassie, slaughtered last month
For a cellphone, or the five
children washed so clean one
Saturday afternoon, and piled
One on the other in their bath
in Zwide that all the rivers of eternity
could not wash them cleaner.

O waters of Valley Road, who dares
Fear no evil, or think its torrent
Cannot sweep them away
Like butterflies from the willow branch,
Let them dip their hands in you,
To be stained by the slime
Of your scales, and when they
Pull them from your belly again
Let them look into the face
Of the gasping, surprised, writhing
Thing they hold and see
Their own faces looking back at them,
And then let them say these words
Over and over, like a psalm:
“Our waters, Our valley, Our shadow”.