The Dee As A Deity

#Sometimes she stabilises. Sometimes she surges and floods Like a burst aneurysm When I look at her I grow perky As a falcon rending a mouse She talks with the tongues of water This Druid Goddess Don't walk in out of your depth She will catch your breath People kneel by her side To weep, make love, to rest She babbles the gossip of the Bens The tales of peaty tributaries She welcomes incomers, animals Slips down throats like silk A schizophrenic lady, she has a dark side Bards write songs and poems to her, Their water muse, who coils like an adder Home to the salmon, the otter Pearl mussel and speckled trout Forests rinse roots in her pools Alder buds and willows peep in her mirrors Her power is burgeoning Her bens and castles share their bloody stories This is a mythic river, an alchemist Transforming water to gold Horses dream in the pastures of her glens Brides snap their wedding moments by her side Her waters break, give birth to shoals of silver Starshine seams her sides. She flowers in pools Like a lotus, like a spreading skirt of petals Often and ever I've sat, entranced on her banks In her valleys, beside her watery corridors Thirled to her swirls and currents. Each evening I drowse with her sounds in my head Like the strumming of Orphic lutes