By Arturo Mann (User:Feralaas) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I was born from the remnants of stars. The hydrogen that fuels their fires twice forms me, along with the oxygen through which all energy finds release. So abundantly have I grown from that first molecule that I cover two-thirds of the earth. And I am the giver of life.

Have you not called me a goddess in a thousand tongues, a god in a hundred? And why not? Whether born from wombs or crawled from seas, it’s all the same: you are my children.

Do I not nourish you? Your earliest permanant villages depended upon me, so beside the flowing rivers of Indus, Tigris/Euphrates, or Nile you built your first. You scarred the earth with channels to irrigate your crops. You channeled me through your aquaducts to hydrate your cities, borrowed my strength to grind your grain and powered your earliest industrial technology. You’ve traversed me in every imaginable watercraft, and you’ve harnessed me to your need at your convenience. In the end, You will wage your last wars preserving the remaining pure sources of me.

Or will you drown in the deluge you unleash? Already I seize land by centimeters a year. What parts of me stood statue-still now flow and consume. While elsewhere, I ignore the desperate cries of a parched land and a dehydrated people.

I yield, therefore I’m strong. Mountains bend before me over time. Warriors fashion their art on my flowing motion. I am the bringer of death as well as the giver of life. Why else do so many of your cultures speak of a flood?

Know me, and embrace me in awe. I am water. This is my psalm.

wind on the water

quivering sunlight spreads out

on countless ripples

for Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Water, posted by Sumana Roy