The Severn – A River Muse – Live The Flow

I wrote these word several decades ago to explore the parallels between our personal life journey and that of the River Severn

THE JOURNEY

On Plynlimon’s sun-soaked summer heights
Seeping from marsh and peat, vulnerable,
A humble birth exposed to heather and to sky.
Nothing of the passion and pain of human dawn,
No hint of the barren blasted winter of that place.
Crawling this wilderness an embryonic life:
A trickle here, a tumble there,
A new adventure in the making.
Who would guess the destiny of this infant dribble
Or dream the awesome power to come?

Suddenly: walking, running, jumping, falling,
Carving your childhood from the mountain of your birth.
We loved your falls and pools, the shallows and the deeps.
Delights of discovery in forest and glade.
Your sparkling life: a copious energy, a purity to lose,

Too soon your youth: an identity to be tamed,
Muscle exploited by mills, contained by walls,
Glimpses of a channelled, constricted life to come.
Crushing forces to harness the flood of your power,
Your benign vigour a great blessing for many.

Absorbing countless others you conquer lands,
Large lush valleys and plains your domain.
A new name, a fresh country, more challenges.
A partner flows in: a natural marriage,
An affinity of splendour and creative purpose.

Maturity brings a nervous truce.
You an object of desire and beauty, a focal point:
Settlements, bridges, homes, parks and walks,
Fishermen at peace, the smooth power of the scull,
Succulent meadows, contented cattle, an English idyll.

Then, the strife of endeavour: a collision with human history
No longer your own, a life usurped;
County towns wrap around the stream of commerce;
The industrial revolution spawned in your gorge:
The iron bridge a symbol to the world.
Burdened by roles you did not seek,
Power yoked but yet a life engaged.
Cities crowd your banks and empty their waste.
Dammed and channelled, a shadow of yourself,
A life eclipsed or a triumph of achievement?
Where lie the boundaries of user and used,
The interface of will and destiny,
of service and freedom.
The stream of life where opposites connect.
A smooth flowing mirror above,
Murky depths below travelling the tensions of life.

Then, in those few outrageous beautiful weeks,
The awesome loaded roar of naked aggression,
Humanity overwhelmed, nature resplendent,
Autumnal reflections in victorious waters,
A purged river rejects the leeward levee of plastic debris.

Age, the unsolicited force stealthily intrudes.
Realities dawn in the remorseless passage of time.
Gradual change is hijacked by a sudden redundancy:
Desertion, by those you carried, to an artificial stream.
But can you rediscover yourself, be free to roam again?

The pace is slow, measured meanders of comfort;
Loads are dropped on long soft silted beaches.
Effort is focused in easy assaults on old sediment;

Rolling, surging, laughing right up your throat
That triumphant tidal icon mocks your former self.
New dramas, new extremes of abundance and emptiness;
A mysterious combination of death and immortality.
A beginning, an end or just a change?

Such contrasts now,
The rotting hulks of former years contain the wayward incontinence of age.
A last hoorah: the cooling of nuclear heat
Before a fraternal integration of connected spirits
Then you’re finally bridged and beached,
…Your wide expanses now officially dead.

Strange new forces ebb and flow,
Your mastery is gone.
A union with the future brooks no challenge.
Where is that infant dribble now? Are you no longer you,
Just a huge expanse of rock, sand, treacherous channels,
And submerged lands: the sediments of history?
Now your borders make a huge intrusion in our coast.
What if we built the barrage, where then your end?

NOTES

All images, except the one of the Severn Bore, are original. The earlier pictures predate my change to digital photography. Anyone may use this material but should acknowledge source. I retain the right to publish. Thanks and a tribute to Jenny who allowed me to join her on this walk intended as a self-awareness project – how perceptive this intention proved to be.