Friday, March 05, 2010


Apparently in 1992, the UN General Assembly designated the 22nd of March each year as World Water Day!

The Unesco Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science at the University of Dundee are, this year, hosting an online interactive event and other events on that day throughout Dundee. They are looking for links to poems about water. So if you post a water poem on your blog and link to their page they will link to you also (you have to send your link to this email. Thanks to Rachel for the heads-up, check out her three water poems here, plus Colin has one up on his blog here.

Anyone who has read my blog for a while knows that water features very prominantly in my poems, well that's because I live next to the beautiful Firth of Clyde (pictured above)!.

Here's a watery poem of mine which I wrote almost exactly a year ago when I was pregnant with my daughter.


Heliotropism

Waves rise from nowhere
like the water pearl

wrapping its layer
upon layer within
my mantle folds.

A lochan is gathering
its cushiony hold
under my skin,

a sea swelling
in my bones.

The air is fresh with snow
and the faint halo
of a daylight moon.

I’m walking into the light
and wondering,
if like a sunflower,

you’re turning,
heliotropic,
in my womb.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love this one. Some very strong and evocative images.

Marion McCready said...

thanks colin! I'm glad you like it :)

An Honest Man said...

This one really speaks to me.

Marion McCready said...

I'm glad it does, thanks honest man :)

Dominic Rivron said...

What a terrific poem!

Thanks for the tip. I'll see if I can come up with something suitably watery before that date.

Marion McCready said...

thankyou dominic! I look forward to your watery poem :)

James Owens said...

Thanks for posting this one again! A nice poem to re-visit. I liked it a lot the first time, and even more now, Maybe this is just the effect of having listened to the Hughes interview a few minutes ago -- but I seem to hear Plath’s voice whispering off to the side in this … though the poem is still very much your own….

swiss said...

heliotroic. works for me every time.

Roxana said...

i simply adore this. images and sounds, everything perfectly woven. mysterious and yet amazingly simple and clear.

Marion McCready said...

hi james, thankyou! now I'm trying to imagine Plath reading my poem, lol

thanks swiss!

thanks roxana, I'm very glad you like it!

neil robertson said...

Enjoyed your poem ...... You might also like this link to Smithsonian
Folkways in Washington DC and this
link to a very funny rendition of
'A Lum Hat Wantin' a Croon' [Top Hat minus a crown .. and all the
other detritus that ended up in a
Scottish burn!] sung by Rory and
Alex McEwen of Marchmont House in
Polwarth, Berwickshire in 1957. It
is on CD from Smithsonian Folkways
along with a very grim 28 second dialogue between The Tweed and The Till ('The Twa Rivers') - in which
two of the rivers featuring in the Dundee Unesco Water Law Centre's case-study of the HELP programme
on The Tweed compare notes on just
how many men they've drowned .....

Enjoy! I also strongly recommend
'The New Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 1805-2005'
by the Selkirk poet and
historian Walter Elliot.

neil robertson, Dundee and Unesco Scotland

http://www.folkways.si.edu/albumdetails.aspx?itemid=1237