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Sunday, January 23, 2011

Commentary on "The Thief of Water"



The Thief of Water is a poem I wrote in my poetry blog last year, and I have been working on an extension of it since then, more as a novel than poem. This note was made today:

Faith is Water.
To most of us, Faith is Rain: it falls from the elevated places on high upon those beneath and brings them relief from the heat, growth for their crops, and sometimes the irate ravages of floods. However, that is the end of it. When rain has reached the earth and been taken into the soil, or the flood has reached the trampling-stones at the doors of the sea, there is an end to it.

But that is not how Faith is.
Beyond the soil and  beyond the seas are the vast and somnolent aquifers beneath the surface of the planet, where waters old when the human race was young still reside in their almost pristine majesty. Then there are the subterranean rivers rushing through caverns unknown to man, rushing like Coleridge's Alph to seas that have not seen the sun since the first comets fell.
From here the waters cycle and re-cycle, eventually finding the sun, evaporating back into the heavens like rarified spirits of Heracleitus, losing their spirituous nature and condensing into clouds to rain down again, flowing in freshets and in acequias and through engineered systems to refresh every person.

Faith never stops. If Faith stops, the world ends.

--
note:  acequia  - a water channel in desert areas of North America

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This is awesome, and I really like.

Montag said...

Thanks, B.