Some days every thing is elemental

 In the market square I bought
ten yellow tulips, grown in a field

under a blue sky, row upon row
now grown old, they flare

open petals widen, bowing reaching
greeting the air, becoming more free

and lighter, as if somewhere wild roses called to them
to be wind blown frayed and wet.

Scattering their clothes like so many petals
the children return from school to dance

to leap and stamp as if to wake the earth
and conjure again the wood, the orange moon

through the magical power of their swishing hair.
Some days every thing is elemental and I float

in the bath, feeling the water flowing between my fingers
as if it were still plentiful, smelling softly of peat

with small black elvers swimming in its dark green secrets
beginning their life journey back to the Sargasso Sea.

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Elvers
The eel is on the point of extinction. Since the fifties, the number of eels has declined sharply. The influx of elvers, young eels which swim from the ocean up river, in recent years is less than 1% of the level in 1950. It was in the fifties that dioxins started to appear in the environment.

19/05/06