"The Waters and the Wind" by James Frederick William Rowe

The Waters and the Wind

James Frederick William Rowe

The river again flows

Through the dry and desiccated gully

That long ago had marked its path

And now once more conveys

The surging onrush of the waters

From ice crowned crags

To the frothed seas

This is the ancient way

Made fresh through time

The great river returned

Which once watered the horses

Of our ancestral kin

Come down from the North

To ravage and rapine

As a single wave of wind

Bends the heads of the flowered fields

So did they cow their foes

Unchallenged, we shall likewise gust

Unresisted, they shall beg our mercy

And give up as ransom

Their lives and land

Soon the sky shall mark our dominion

The horizon our only borders

The cerulean posts of our domain

The river shall have given us this

Its current a stream of blessings

And we shall pray our gratitude by its banks

What is now desert

Will again be a fertile plain

Meadows of tall grass and many flowers

The time of kings returns

As again we drink the river's strength

And refresh our conquering hearts

Our swordsmen souls

Poet’s Notes:  “The Waters and the Wind” started off on the subway, and I struggled finishing it for quite a while.  It was only when I moved the third stanza to the final position that I was satisfied with the poem being complete. 

The poem is inspired by the Aryan invasion of India, as well as the notion that the fight between Indri and Vritra dragon, where Vritra is said to have held back the rivers, is a mythologized account of an ancient river drying up for a time, perhaps due to the glaciation of its headwaters. Of course, there is no serpent here, nor a hero for him to battle, but simply the idea that a conquering people have felt renewed by the return of a river to ride once more onto victory. 

Each stanza is seven verses in length, and, as the title implies, the ideas of the water (in the form of the river) and the wind (the people) are recurring themes. The influence that these natural forces have on the land is constantly referenced, such that the land becomes a passive object of action, as reflected in the effect of the waters and the wind to shape and control the life of the fields, as the conquering host will soon do by way of the sword.

The narrator is unidentified, but I think of him almost as a priest-king amongst his people, making sense of the divine hand at play in the return of the river. His voice is the rallying cry for the others, the call to arms that will see their future success, promising them the glory that he foresees in the river's refreshed course. No other characters are present, but I almost feel as if this poem is his address to his people, a speech or statement of intent for their future conquests.