The Waterfall

I flow,
Free, fluid, fervent, fleeting,
Floating through forests, grasslands, and hills.

You try and use my
Form for you function —
For you farms, for your cargo,
Your wars, your waste, and your dead.

Go ahead.

I accept all materials of the Earth,
Yet am tainted by none.

And even as my body
Acts as a conduit for the World,
My Spirit is Free.

~ Terence Tuhinanshu

Origin

Some ineffable inspiration from a dear poet friend, whose bravery in the face of harshness, and commitment to all that is good and right in the world is as compelling as it is enthralling.

I also wanted to further experiment with combining lettering and poetry, and try more visually expressive poems, such as H. Masud Taj‘s The Bat. Unfortunately I am unable to find that poem online, and the book that features it is in India, but by altering the lengths of each line, the poem draws out the shape of a bat, in addition to being about a bat, and called The Bat. I don’t remember when I saw it (probably in the early to mid 2000’s), but I remember being very impressed by it, and the idea of visual-semantic mirroring stuck.

Commentary

This is not the best execution of the strategy of visual-semantic mirroring, which I’m sure takes a great deal of thought, revision and iteration to achieve. This poem does not really look like a waterfall. This was spontaneous, done in one continuous flow, much like most of my poetry. There are a few edits, and these have been added to the text in this post. Specifically, the phrase ‘Your wars’ was added to the last line of the second para, and ‘touched’ has been replaced by ‘tainted’ in the fourth.