This Water
trickles
splashes,
plops
and spills, times nine
over your drought-ridden crevasses.

Your skin hangs limp over your juttings
like a balloon deflated,
shocked
at the sudden escape of your soul.
Your white nub of an elbow,
audacious, really, in its persistence
not to be left behind,
still thrusts forward,
ludicrous,
like a lollypop in shrink wrap.

Drink, my love, drink.
A supply for your journey.
Drink more.
Drink.

You are a child of water.
Propelled from water
you bleated, you suckled,
and like a lamb’s, your skin
plumped out.

Drink, my love, drink.

Let these waters
cleanse you
caress you,
carry you.

Like Moses on the River,
like Noah in his ark,
new and renewed
innocent and pure
and deliver you,
on the last trickle of tide
into the arms of your Beloved.

Anita was born and lives in Melbourne Australia. She has worked variously as a journalist, academic and celebrant. She now gives her time to making art and to writing. She attributes her love of words to her father, who was a wonderful raconteur, her love of aesthetics, to her mother, who had a keen eye for colour and form, and is grateful to both, for keeping the doors open to Judaism.