Poem for Basia Irland

I so admire Basia Irland’s eco art. And was honored to be asked to write a poem for a catalog of her work in a European show.

CONFLUENCE: On The Art of Basia Irland
by Miriam Sagan

The river
Flows with its currents
Of ice and time’s seeds;
Polar caps may melt, drawn
Into warming seas, winding
Into a lost geography.

Water might be a library, an archive, a graphology
Marking the globe with endless patterned rivers
And each direction gives birth to wind
As you try to stay current
As if you might draw,
In moist sand, a flower gone to seed.

Or maybe it is seed
Gone to flower—who can measure all the hydrography,
Aquatic maps, and constellations, drawn
With a stick in dirt, to mark an estuary, a river
Or the heart’s currents
As they wind and unwind.

A rise in the wind
Scatters seed
Across a current
Navigated by books of ice, a library
Dissolving in the river
Like converging lines drawn

Towards an infinite point. Drawing
Down the voices of the wind
That sculpt cliffs with the river;
Thoughts seeded
To create a story, biography,
In which the past remains current.

We ourselves must join the current.
Ice turns to water, mist draws
Moisture from the graphs
Of wind
Encircling the earth, seeding
A hope that can only be called river.

All rivers head for the sea, flow, debris, currents.
A seed is resurrection, you draw
A manuscript of earth which is everyone’s autobiography.