Water

Water

by Wendell Berry

I was born in a drouth year. That summer

my mother waited in the house, enclosed

in the sun and the dry ceaseless wind,

for the men to come back in the evenings,

bringing water from a distant spring.

Veins of leaves ran dry, roots shrank.

And all my life I have dreaded the return

of that year, sure that it still is

somewhere, like a dead enemy's soul.

Fear of dust in my mouth is always with me,

and I am the faithful husband of the rain,

I love the water of wells and springs

and the taste of roofs in the water of cisterns.

I am a dry man whose thirst is praise

of clouds, and whose mind is something of a cup.

My sweetness is to wake in the night

after days of dry heat, hearing the rain.

From The Ecopoetry Anthology, (San Antonio, Texas: Trinity University Press, 2013)

In the forty years I've watched this stream come down from the hills I've never seen it so low and quiet. Daily I'm reminded of what can seem so abstract and far away when printed in a newspaper. Water is essential and vulnerable. We are water protectors.