Daily Poem: The Source ~ Joshua Mehigan
The Source
~ Joshua Mehigan
Water is the least environmentally impactful
beverage and bottled water is the most environmentally
responsible packaged drink choice.
—INTERNATIONAL BOTTLED WATER ASSOCIATION
Far from these woods and this river, far from the Source,
in a made place not easy to comprehend,
harder than woods and river but much less hard,
where sky and grass are priceless or must be shared,
and shade is rectilinear and smooth;
where the scourge teems upward in tall elaborate mounds,
and doom seeps outward, settling a dull gray crust
over what once were woods and river like these;
in the back of a double-locked shelter in a room where salt
and bread are kept safe from the rain, from rats and starlings,
in a humming iron chest that holds inside it
fresh weather like that of a day between fall and winter;
on a crowded shelf of that chest stands a vessel pressed
from molecules of degraded plantlife and creatures;
and there, in that thin vessel—that is where
the creature, exiled forever from the Source,
further and further cut off from woods and river,
keeps for itself eight handfuls of the river.
It opens the door of the chest. It stands and drinks.
The once-living bottle is see-through like the contents,
the label of vegetable fiber the color of envy.
