This week’s poem, Claire Parker’s “Water & human happiness,” bears witness to how inextricably and with what feeling we are bound with water. I love this poem’s intimate details of fingers in currents and its searching questions about our more timeless sources and flows.

Parker (she/her and they/them) is a transplant to coastal Maine. She grew up in southern California and traveled all over the West Coast and western mountains as a young adult, including multiple jaunts up to Alaska. She is an organic veggie farmer, community herbalist, woods witch, former trail crew and forestry worker, and now spends most of her time bouncing between the Midcoast and Down East. She has been writing poems since she was 4 years old.

Poets, please note that submissions to Deep Water are open through the end of the year. Deep Water is especially eager to share poems by Black writers, writers of color, indigenous writers, LGBTQ+ writers, and other underrepresented voices. You’ll find a link to submit in the credits below.

Water & human happiness
By Claire Parker

She talks about the water like history
like her story
like facts of the origin from where the well springs
like childhood is a drying lake
and there is a reason for our sadness

I want to know how something feels when
you spend all day talking about it like,
How does it feel to go home and run that
hot water through your hands, through
your fingers that mold tiny waterfalls
Is it the same water that you cognate
and ponder and make policy for
Is it the same water you feel in rivulets
down sore shoulders after a long day
of fighting about water

I’ve seen where she comes from but
I don’t understand it
when I asked in dappled conifer light at the reservoir wall
How does it feel to be home she said something
like, my home isn’t here
anymore, it dried up—

Water & human happiness
Can happiness make the water flow
Can water do the same for the human condition, stagnant
behind walls and drought and law
Can the dams stop our feelings of
home, take the meaning from our stories, make
a prison of a forest

The people follow the water here
and the people are sinking

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Water & human happiness,” copyright 2023 by Claire Parker, appears by permission of the author. Submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of the year. For more information, go to mainewriters.org/deep-water.

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