The Ecology of Water

zoejparsons
Nov 24, 2022
2 min read

Published by Femzine

‘I praise the scoring drought, the flying dust, the drying creek, the furious animal, that they oppose us still; that we are ruined by the thing we kill.’ - Judith Wright, ‘Australia 1970’

‘Like, when I / use the word ‘eternity’, when what I mean to say, is ‘water’. - Amanda Joy, ‘Almost Pause / Pareidolia’

aqua vitae / aqua mortis aqua mortis / aqua vitae

They said three rivers

fell from the sky

They called it unprecedented:

but that was a lie

There was a castle that swam to great heights & children fell. I thought of Les Miserables; of revolution, yes, but more of people singing; of castles on clouds

& my tears join the flood

Streets turned rivers birth amniotic sacs of screams and we wonder how to hold water in our humble hands, how to hold time when our humble hearts go

tick tick tick

to the beat of rain drops until the rain becomes a roar. tonare: the word stunned comes from thunder.

How do the butterflies fare? when cyan fingers smudge pastel sky & sea and lay the earth bare blues weep into bloodstreams, cyanosis: may suggest a problem of the lungs or heart. Delicate wings fray, no rest from fluttering no place to stay

water- logged wings, flooded cells, lyse sounds too close to lies

7968.88kg of uranium- rain graced Maralinga in its fall Little Boy we learn about Little Black Boys Dead we Don’t crystal water muddied eddies churn up / down muddle and muck we don’t give a fuck when mother weeps

Pouring like blood from the open wound of boundless plains to plunder

& her tears join the flood

Tampa bloodies the whole ocean & we toss bottles overboard

(and babies) hoping words will reach someone, somewhere

something...

Turbulent tides

of time

tumble over

tortured souls

trapped under the surface.

& we cannot breathe. What pumps the stream when there is no heart?

My friend said she thought the moon would taste like marshmallows:

musk at dusk. So much softness in a world so harsh. & until strong arms arrest their pull waves keep tumbling, pregnant clouds keep rumbling, and we stumble up- on the shore

Atoms that once were water - because matter is never created, nor is it destroyed - flow through streams / stars / tears / space / oceans: one

We fight against tides, amidst ourselves, but cannot fight fluid- ity

Walter Lehman (‘’) wrote of

a seal who broke the glassy surface (ceiling) to frolic in the shallows. A blind woman cannot see confined to the gallows of her mind, never free.

Men with grubby fingers grasp at our core, wretched cattle catch on barbed wire, their plush flesh (that never belonged to us in the first place), never laid to rest but !