Witham

 

Witham

 

River-dwellers, fen-splodgers, woad-daubed,

worshippers at the watergate to the other world,

offering to the naiad of the stream the best they had,

ornate weaponry, shields and daggers, torcs and brooches,

richly fashioned with chased coils and inlays,

consigned to mud and peat and silt,

from wooden walkways and dug-out boats.

 

In return they received the river’s blessing:

teal and wigeon, salmon and eels,

roots and rhizomes from the land’s edge,

the wisdom of the hazel-nuts from the carr,

with seeds from grass and rush and sedge, the wood

to build their homes and ritual pathways through the mire.

 

Now tamed, the river floods no more, flows in straight cuts

through the holy sites, under a windswept sky,

across a level land of cabbages, winter wheat and beet.

Yet still the deepest plough reveals

the trunks of blackened bog-oak from those distant times,

and silt dredged from the Witham’s bed

reveals again the hidden treasures

of the past.

 

Published in “Here and now” by United Press 2011.

 

Done