Water's Children

By Rowena Conahan

​1
Pull off your shoes 
and lay your bare feet 
against the dew-soft earth. 
The sun warms the morning, 
casting tiny grass shadows, 
slanting through the edge of the woods. 
 
A moment’s hesitation at the great green wall, 
boundary between the safe-known 
and the secret-wild. 
And then, we are padding down 
the deer’s narrow, fringed trail. 
 
A trickle, like fairy bells, 
leads us onward.
 
In the moment that we see it, 
there is nowhere else to go, 
nothing else to do 
but sink down and gaze, 
and breathe.
 
Water bubbles over black stones, 
twisting and tumbling upon itself. 
A rabbit could leap across it 
without flicking an ear, 
and still, in its miniature, 
it is every holy river on earth.
 
The moss here is a deep, thick sponge, 
spidering down the slick rocks, 
sprawling across the backs of 
damp, crumbling mother logs 
whose bodies are laced with 
mycelia that raise tender, fungal wings 
in delicate rows. 
 
These are water’s children.
 
2
Mushroom and moss belong to the earth. 
But dry them out and they must pause, 
shrinking to a shadow of their water-flush selves 
or vanishing (apparently) for good. 
And they may hold this way for a long, 
long time.
 
Give them just one night of rain, though, 
and there they are again, 
verdant, plush, so vivid 
you see them 
before any other part of the scene 
comes into focus.
 
Soft and low, they scroll around 
and through the rubbled terrain, 
bearing grit and bark flakes within their flesh, 
opening fronds and gills 
to the weavings of smaller beings.
 
Water’s children notice things. 
 
A careless footstep 
can mark them deeply, 
scoring a new pattern into their 
ever-remolding bodies.
 
3
In the trees above, 
a flock of new wrens muscles about. 
So busy they are, so jubilant, 
it is as though the rill below doesn’t even exist. 
They fluff their feathery jackets 
and spill out liquid song. 
They chatter and jockey with one another, 
glorying in a rattling cat-scold. 
 
The wren knows she is a child of the air. 
Her life is a darting 
from one twig to the next, 
her beak pinching out grubs 
containing all the water 
she might ever need.
 
4
But doesn’t water come, sometimes, 
like a flood of emotion, 
sweeping us away 
in its churn of sand and muck? 
And as it ebbs, 
do we not find ourselves 
nourished, in the end, by the settling tumult, 
blinking at rain beads glinting in the light?
 
Some stroke their feathers with oil 
and scale them shut against the deluge. 
But others cannot hide. 
Their pores open wide for all of it.
Who?
 
Who are they? 
Who are the water’s children?
 
They are sensitive.
 
5
Sensitive.
 
Do you buffle and flap 
in your haste to retreat from that word?
In the silence of your heart, 
do you fear your kinship to water?
Perhaps you know, and wish you didn’t, 
that the strongest among us 
also feel.
 
6
The sun swings high and over, 
and the shadows are now 
long tree fingers pointing home. 
The moss has nearly overgrown our legs, 
we’ve settled so deeply 
into this streamside, 
but it’s time to move. 
 
A flicker there, 
in the shadows, though, 
holds us still.
 
Gently she comes, 
quiet, furtive. 
 
The wren hops, flicks, 
tilts her head, and hops again. 
And finally, 
she alights, dips, 
and drinks. 
 
For even she, 
darling of the light and the air, 
understands
that we are all 
 
water’s children.