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29th March, 2024

Friday Poem – ‘Water’ by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams

A mountain landscape beneath a cloudy sky

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Water from Spring in Saskatchewan’ by Hilary Llewellyn-Williams which features in The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems.

from Spring in Saskatchewan for Jeanne-Marie de Moissac, and others Water Here they’re called sloughs, pronounced slews: springfed pools in the vast dry dome of the prairie. Water that stands alone, watching the sky, that makes a print of the sky; a film moving over its lens, with clouds blowing out and upward, miles deep. The earth opens, revealing the stratosphere, the wind, the thinning air. Your face a shadow featureless, as you lean against the light to look in. we are blanked out by height and depth and distance, silhouettes, little dancing sticks on the broad flank of the world. The slough’s view: eyeless heads and peeled limbs, a brief disturbance of vision. The white blur of ice is gone, snow blindness. This is spring: reed-tips prickle its skin. Its feathers ruffle. Ducks settle over its heart. Its water-body contains the whole sky. Out here at dusk you can watch darkness seep along the land, spread over the sky like paint; you can feel the tilt of the earth, the roll away from the sun. a great beast turning over. The sloughs its eyes. This one, teeming with frogs, a cacophony of sex and ecstasy, full moon frog rave.
The grit road a pale smear, rubbed out by coming footsteps of night. Winter is over. The land breathes, water sees, birds meet and couple, frogs party, sky soars, the horizon uncurls. Soon green will spike the dun stalks. Crocus glances blue through sagebrush. Sweetgrass. This is the eye of the world.

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Related Books

The Little Hours: New and Selected Poems

Hilary Llewellyn-Williams

Buy now