THE WATER TOWER
This morning a blackbird sounds an incessant alarm call after I have hit the snooze button twice. I take this as a sign to get up and see the day. The air smells of bare branches and the crows are conversing from chimney pots.
Alt text says this week’s photo is a person jumping off a water tower. I say I am rather glad it isn’t and that instead it is Herne Bay Water Tower in the late afternoon sun with Ronnie jumping for joy.
There is something reassuring about seeing the Water Tower each time I visit my hometown, and I love that this stark, concrete building can warm my heart. Taking a moment to notice it and feel the wave of nostalgia always feels comforting. It’s like a friendly, “welcome back”.
My brother was very good at building a replica of this tower with Lego when we were little, and along with Herne Windmill, it is a much-loved landmark from my childhood. Both these structures were most often viewed from a distance, and I felt in awe of the Water Tower’s height when capturing this photo. As I write thinking about being small in comparison to something tall, I can hear the sound of my brother fixing Lego bricks together and I can feel that satisfying squeeze/click as the bricks lock into place under the guidance of fingers. (I can also picture plasticene squeezed in the ‘stickles’ of sticklebricks, but that’s another kind of memory!)
Staying with the nostalgic I decided that the poem that would be most fitting for this week’s blog would be the one that features the pond in Herne Bay Park.
Herne Bay pond holds many memories for me. My brother and I used to canoe on it, my sister and I saw a gull eat a duckling after swooping for bread, then the duckling, then another beakful of bread (The most unsettling sandwich ever!) and it is always good to take a stroll there to find out if the terrapin is basking on the rock by the island. This poem was written after my sister rang me one day to tell me that the terrapin was not there and that whilst looking she had seen an abandoned doll floating in the water.
It seems apt to mention that there’s something dark about ponds for me... a slow evolution based on what it already holds...the long decay of what people discard there... the risk of stagnation. To me this kind of water seems a stark contrast to the tidal nature of the sea.
When I visited this time, the pond was having a massive clean out and I wondered what the wildlife would make of its new cocktail. And although I mention one terrapin because that’s all I used to seem to see when I was younger there are actually a number there now so that slow evolution is fruitful.
No Terrapin Today
Just her in the water.
The sun warming her
as she floats.
A fallen leaf,
landed beside her,
shines its green to the sky.
Branches and leaves
pattern her outline
with their shadows.
You say you want to photograph her,
that you wonder what her eyes are seeing
as she lies unmoving in the water.
I can only think of thick mud
holding on tight to faded crisp packets.
But look, you say, she is smiling.
And she is.
Her long hair floats out
like golden pondweed,
and she looks happy
the abandoned doll
eyes wide,
eyelashes still curled,
that mouth.
As if she doesn’t even know
she was thrown in,
left behind.
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