I’m still buzzing from watching the John Coombes/Holmfirth Writers’ Group film, Wordflow at Holmfirth Arts Festival (see https://timwordsblog.wordpress.com/2024/06/02/wordflow/). Though I’d heard the poems before, it was the first time I’d seen the film. It melded so well with the words, producing a very satisfying overall experience.
So I thought I’d share my poem from the film – also published in the accompanying Wordflow booklet.
Becomings
In this place was a lake, where the rivers once came
with the soil they had scoured from the mountains above.
Here they joined, became still and relinquished their load,
so their brown, rushing water became blue and clear
and the pine trees grew tall by the wave-caressed shore.
Over time, those same rivers, the rain and the ice
ground the mountains to hills and the hills into plains
and the water was filled with the dust of their bones.
Then the trees and the rivers all faded away
as the lake became mud, and the mud became stone.
Underneath, the old earth gave a shrug in her sleep.
The plain was now folded and thrust to the sky
and the sandstone laid down in the lake that had died,
made from dust of forgotten hills long worn away
would be moulded like clay into peaks of its own.
And of course, there is rain, there is ice, there is snow
and the flesh of the mountain is bitten once more
by the streams that emerge, like the sweat on its skin,
that will swell into rivers and flow down its flanks
and the valley they carve will be filled … by a lake.
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