Rebirth

River Thames, Thames Head, 19/11/25 (after a visit on 22/09/25)

I don’t know what I expected;

months of dryness had burned the River to dust;
a grieving knot in the gut - would it ever rise, and flow again
in the landscape,
or the heart?

I’d just meant to have a walk -
it was a blue day and cold, I had no hat,
and a limp;
over stiles, at the field boundary,
holding my breath,
approaching the lip of grass,
that was once River’s edge -

and there, the thirsty stones, swallowed
River running full
just a few days young, glass-clear over silvered green,
ringing like a bell, bursting from the crusted ground,
carrying light,
a universe being born;

the sun drawing a line between unimaginable infinity,
and the clod of wet leaves under my feet, and the bubbling well -
straight through the trees and, by some miracle,
through this limping body,
through all of us;

All this time, she’d been running in the dark of the black earth
and in the merging clouds; her memory, her dreaming, running;
in our skin; in our fingers, in our sleep;

ringing
like a bell.

I’d taken an unplanned solo walk on my birthday to one of the sources of River Thames. Back in September, the long summer drought had rendered her bone-dry for several miles at the headwaters - and just a few miles from the headwaters of River Frome, my closest River-kin, whose springs also ran dry this summer. Talking to a dogwalker, the water had only returned five days ago with prolonged torrential rain, lifting the water table. The rebirth of a river.