The patterns in the water speak
A different tale each day
And if you’re watching carefully
You can hear what they say
They tell of lands across the sea
Of spiring minarets
Where gold’s inlaid on every step
And tiger’s kept as pets
They speak of grim and icy plains
The barren wastes abroad
Where village blacksmiths still are called
When horses must be shod
The hazy steam of jungles deep
With caverns of fine gems
Where clothing is a mythic thing
And no one’s heard of hems
The desert peaks of sand dunes broad
Where salt flecks in the air
Where raving tyrants sing mad songs
And all that’s foul’s fair
The whispers of the sea people
Come down to capture lands
And empires that rose and fell
In glorious last stands
But now their tales are lost to time
And all that will remain
Are whirlpools in the great world’s tub
All spinning down the drain
The original inspiration for this poem was the water of the Potomac River that always seems to have a different shape to its ripples every time I pass over it on the yellow line as I go in to work. Sometimes the water is disturbed, brown, and you can’t make out anything in it, some days the wind has died down and you can see the bridges perfectly in the reflection of the water. I have a firm belief that the first time I went into DC on the VRE alone, the water was perfectly still and a mirror of the world and that I’ll spend the rest of my life chasing that vision of two bridges, one a perfect copy of the other on a canvas made of liquid glass.1
As to what this poem ended up being: I think I’ve been reading too much history recently and it’s seeping into the part of my brain that comes up with these.
Footnotes
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It’s also possible that the water was never that still and I simply didn’t look closely when I went to listen to Chloe Cole speak at the Heritage Foundation. ↩