Thousand Year Poems 4 The Song of the Old Crone River

How do you write loss
On a book of faces?
How do you love, when that word
will be spoken
Tomorrow?

I, the daughter of blue hills
Have written joy on pebbles in my bed
And made music
As I danced from moon to moon.

Around the rolling downs by the bend
I saw him.
And stopped.

What ails thee, my man? I stood still by  him. He was so tired, so broken.

Go away. Run, said he.

I did not. He was so alone.
I, who sang the trees to flower, and the grass to quicken, did not know alone.
It seemed heartbreaking.

Oh, what ails thee?
Please, what ails thee?

I have crossed a desert, he said.
My people are dying of thirst.
I am dying of thirst.
What are you?
Are you more, than a sip of water?

Am I?

Now,
I do not dance. I walk slowly
Slowly, like a narrow, old woman.
By his village on the downs
Where his children play
And trees flower.

To love is to write loss
On leaves fallen far, far away
And ask the wind
To blow
..............................................................

Art by Lagnajita Roy