Diving Rod

By Tuğçe Akyüz

Professional danc-er? Sorry, I’m new here.

Dowser, corrected the man at the door. Using a forked stick

he found water. Slogged across the continents, a squatter

I was, my eyes tamed by corrections, tumbled down

hijacked and re-versed, welcomed him into the house
 

Sub-urbs was where we lived - a weak husband, a small job

big dry garden. He came in with his sticks and forks, he came in

wobbling under our plain roof and adjectives with arms

muscled and a face thickened like a hard-boiled egg

 
Doodlebugging, well-witching, never heard?

A crafty man with a pro-fession and important words.

He would put our homestead in repair

And raise another brood, with the prospect of water

restore the fecundity to nature at the mossy patch there

he took my hand to air where I held the stick and

watched the witch steep in.

 
We seemed to him so alien, specimen-like

coupled and married, so flustered with our survival bugs

and smelly teas -hurried, he talked to me in sprints

Taking his tongue all the way to his molar teeth:

a vein, a hickory, a pendulum and spring.

“Some Sorcerers did boast they had a Rod,” he recited.

The Sourcers? Sourcing the hidden Treasures, I slighted.
 

Dark time my husband dined and whined looking

at the marks on the backyard: Skeptics, science even

a hoax he twined. And closed for the night

had his coffee, fruits peeled and sliced

watching the telly -already dazed he was after

tabulating and tallying afar

accounting and counting aloof

 
One diagonal forth, one zigzag back

All morning, no time mourning, the man did not rest

For a bucket of water, I remembered, how long

my grandmother traversed -and when he said

Gotta move on doll

The witch did not understand, she was

new here -but there was no water, treasures lied

elsewhere leaving as mockery the dream of

well-fed cows and succulent grapes
 

So he told the downhearted witch a story

about rabbits and foxes -and all otherworldly creatures

Like the buffalo, whose sound made her laugh

And remember the yaks back home.

There was not one or two, but four attempts made at this

So listen carefully, we went to establish the rabbits

but they all died

because the animals released were tamed

and white -and not until the wild rabbits

came, the death stopped. And that is how

the nature likes it here -wild and new

like you and a pom and a jackaroo.

With the water, the animals, the nature we hardly

learned, he said, before he ever returned

leaving her mid-air to plant the hazel-tree from

a virgin bough, destitute of sprigs

and quite bare.

This poem is a public submission created for Red Room Poetry's New Shoots digital poetry anthology.