“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
Splosh, it’s the sound of water past the first wall
Here’s the tale of the litany
With which we know not what to do
Natural flow of cursory plenty
Beneath a pervasive naivetes seats:
Makes up more than half of this tiny globe
We proudly call our home
A miraculous state encircled like a robe
That makes our world alone.
It’s the irony of much thirst in abundance
Sploosh, heavy flow careers its way past the second wall
Here’s the tale of a mother girth
With her baby— backed with an ‘oja’
As she plods several kilometers
In thatched flipflops,
And a gourd on her head
Seeking the closest stream of water
To moisten her child’s chapped disposition
A trail of broken gourds
Remind her of the treachery of the path
Her plight teased by a path of mirages
Induced by the hallucinogen of thirst
It’s the tale of another
Gravid 7 months, not yet a mother
With swollen feet
By an antiquated well
In the scalding glistens of helios, the height of summer
She moves with a raving rhythm
Like a mad conductor rendering a hanging theme,
Back and forth, back and forth
As brine collected in perspirant beads on her forehead
All for the droplet
That’ll save her child.
Gurgle, the flow is broken and irregular
‘tis the tale of a boy, with two buckets
Each more than half his weight
And filled to their brims,
He hurtled in a drunken gait
Losing pints of this sacred and scarce
Liquid in the process.
Soon he’s blinded by a trickle of brine
Loses his step, tangles his feet,
Hits the ground with a whine
Spills his water and breaks a bucket
The tale of his brother
With containers twice the size of
A pumpkin gourd
Treading a stony path
Jagged from erosion
Barefooted
As heated rocks poke his soles
Until they form calluses and blisters
The pain though excruciating
His concern is for the containers
For they hold potable water
For a family of four
swish, the water readies for the next step
This isn’t a tale of running taps
And household faucets that work
Or baths with working showers
Or sprinklers for the lawn.
It’s of collected raindrops
Out of need.
“Oja” is a Yoruba word for a piece of cloth a mother uses to hold her baby on her back.
“Water is life
It’s the briny broth of our origins, the pounding circulatory system of the world. We stake our civilization on the coasts and mighty rivers.Our deepest dread is the threat of having too little or too much.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Fresh Water
My name is Ifeoluwa Adebiyi, my faculty host is Dr. Naomi Halas, and my mentor is Dr. Oara Neumann and if there is anything the sixth week has taught, it is that there is a universal form to the lessons we learn. Here’s to a summer of extrapolating empathetically.