A Water Question
October 5, 2026Reading time: 7 minutes
This is the title poem of my second collection which came out in 2015, a lovesong to rain which seemed to characterise our whole lives at the time.
The Territory of Rain
This is the territory of rain.
It is king here, more than cold or wind,
and all living is by negotiation
with flows and falls of water.
Earth and sky are heavy with it.
Peat grips it like a miser's fist.
River runs muddy as rain sloughs
the silt from bank and hillside.
It winks between grass stems,
silvers pot-holes in the tarmac,
attacks roofs with soft persistent fingers,
slips like sorrow between slate and timber.
And yet, the heart lifts at the sound
of falling water. It ripples
and sings like a lullaby,
even when the river is at the doorstep,
even when the soaked ground
gasps for breath and roots begin to rot.
It is king here and we serve it
with macs and umbrellas,
catch its least drips in water-butts,
watch it punch small holes in ponds
delighted, even as we wish it elsewhere.
Not so much these days. In the Dune books, among the Fremen, an existential problem is referred to as a 'water matter'. Water on the harsh desert planet of Arrakis is so scarce that the issue colours every aspect of life there, even the language. This summer I felt we might begin to understand. The drought in England (and in three regions of Scotland), is causing most ordinary people serious concerns. Harvests are poor, feed for animals over the winter is going to be short, water levels are lower than average even in wet places, and there are serious concerns about the quality of water in our rivers. What is more, there is a super-niño forecast which may mean storms and flooding, as the baked ground will not soak up the rain as easily we might expect. Already people are being warned that it will take months of above average rainfall to restore the water-tables to their proper level. Gardening magazines are full of recommendations for planting schemes to cope with hotter, drier summers, and this does not take into account the extra demands that all the projected data centres will make. Everything is now a water question.
I have been thinking about water more lately, as the Season of Creation, which runs from the 1st September to the 4th October was on the theme of 'living water'. It hasn't been all about the polluted chalk streams in England or the damaged desalination plants in Gaza, either. I have been thinking about the bogs which have been rewetted and stopped wildfires in their tracks, about beavers whose dam building activities have restructured the flow of rivers to prevent flooding, of the burn we saw in Argyll last month whose ripples and clucks and gurgles formed the background to our holiday, juvenile guillemots coming up the Clyde to shelter from the stormy weather, grey against the silver, and this spring somewhere above New Lanark, straight from the rock.
Water questions are indeed existential questions, and we need to take care of it urgently, but it wasn't its usefulness that made Celtic writers think of heaven as 'the gleam of light on water'. I'm still writing love songs to water.
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