Poem
Philip Gross
Severn Song
Severn Song
Severn Song
The Severn was brown and the Severn was blue –not this-then-that, not either-or,
no mixture. Two things can be true.
The hills were clouds and the mist was a shore.
The Severn was water, the water was mud
whose eddies stood and did not fill,
the kind of water that’s thicker than blood.
The river was flowing, the flowing was still,
the tide-rip the sound of dry fluttering wings
with waves that did not break or fall.
We were two of the world’s small particular things.
We were old, we were young, we were no age at all,
for a moment not doing, nor coming undone –
words gained, words lost, till who’s to say
which was the father, which was the son,
a week, or fifty years, away.
But the water said earth and the water said sky.
We were everyone we’d ever been or would be,
every angle of light that says You, that says I,
and the sea was the river, the river the sea.
© 2009, Philip Gross
From: The Water Table
Publisher: Bloodaxe, Tarset
Published with kind permission of the author and Bloodaxe.
From: The Water Table
Publisher: Bloodaxe, Tarset
Philip Gross
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1952)
Philip Gross was born in 1952 in Cornwall, and grew up in Plymouth. Since 2004 he has lived and worked in South Wales. With a Cornish mother and an Estonian father, Gross has emerged as one of the greatest poetic voices of displacement, conveying what Terry Eagleton views as "lost bearings and blurred frontiers" (Independent on Sunday). He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1981 and, in the following...
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Severn Song
The Severn was brown and the Severn was blue –not this-then-that, not either-or,
no mixture. Two things can be true.
The hills were clouds and the mist was a shore.
The Severn was water, the water was mud
whose eddies stood and did not fill,
the kind of water that’s thicker than blood.
The river was flowing, the flowing was still,
the tide-rip the sound of dry fluttering wings
with waves that did not break or fall.
We were two of the world’s small particular things.
We were old, we were young, we were no age at all,
for a moment not doing, nor coming undone –
words gained, words lost, till who’s to say
which was the father, which was the son,
a week, or fifty years, away.
But the water said earth and the water said sky.
We were everyone we’d ever been or would be,
every angle of light that says You, that says I,
and the sea was the river, the river the sea.
From: The Water Table
Published with kind permission of the author and Bloodaxe.
Severn Song
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