Channelled - Jo Bell

A two-kingfisher day, with sparrowhawks thrown in
and we were bickering at Kingswood Junction.
Water won’t be told, she said, you never learn.
We settled to the first of nineteen locks.

It got between us with its own built frame;
its greening beams that spoke
an older argument, the slow negotiations
of meadowsweet and pondweed.

The ratchet sound of summer winding in;
the bargain between land and man and water
that earns the right to pass. A can’t-be-hurried
spill of rising inches in the filling chamber,

a measured fall through moss and diesel smoke.
We did not speak until the aqueduct where,
running out of land, the navvies
simply kept on cutting through the sky.

Carry me, the channel says: the bridegroom engineer
must find a way. They never learned to disbelieve.
Water won’t be told, but give it bones
and it will take the shape you train it to.

That iron rib, grown out across the cavity of air and traffic
took us over, laughing. We made our reckoning
and moved on slow as marriage, slow as decades
through a day of gentle sweat, a two-kingfisher day.

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Kingswood Junction on the Stratford and
Grand Union Canals' meeting point

Jo Bell (20th century) England
Jo Bell has been appointed by the Canal & River Trust and the Poetry Society as Canal Laureate for 2013 and 2014. The Canal Laureate project is part of a wider partnership between the Canal & River Trust and Arts Council England, which aims to attract more visitors to the waterways while surprising and delighting existing communities through exciting and innovative art projects. Find out more about her here.