“‘Be Water,’ by Wendy McVicker”
“In the dispiriting wake of a dispiriting election season, I felt the only sustainable way forward would be to choose kindness and love—the soft power of water—not the obdurate hardness of anger and hate. In this poem, I hope to encourage myself and others who feel the same to persist in the quiet work of rearranging the world, to nourish the earth and those beings who share it with us.”—Wendy McVicker
Speculative Friction
By Claire Bateman
GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Hubris)—January/February 2025—Wendy McVicker lives and writes within the curves of the Hocking River, in Athens, Ohio. She served as Athens’ poet laureate from 2020 through 2022 and is a longtime Ohio Arts Council teaching artist. She loves few things more than sharing her love of poetry and collaborating with other artists in a variety of mediums. Her most recent chapbook, Alone in the Burning, was released from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in November 2024.
McVicker shared with us some words about “Be Water”: “A few days after the recent presidential election, I came across Linda Hogan’s poem ‘The Way In’ and was electrified by her line ‘To enter stone, be water.’ In the dispiriting wake of a dispiriting election season, I felt the only sustainable way forward would be to choose kindness and love—the soft power of water—not the obdurate hardness of anger and hate. In this poem, I hope to encourage myself and others who feel the same to persist in the quiet work of rearranging the world, to nourish the earth and those beings who share it with us.”
Be Water
By Wendy McVicker
“To enter stone, be water.” (Linda Hogan)
Machines can smash stone, machines
shear mountains, crush great rocks
into pebbles and raise roaring clouds
of dust that blind and choke — but look
at what water does, year after year gentling
the earth, hollowing rock into curves
and portholes, small places where lichen
and mosses catch hold, endure. Water
eases thirst as it rearranges the world.
Be like that.
Editor’s Note: I am appending to McVicker’s poem above, Linda Hogan’s, which inspired it:
The Way In
By Linda Hogan
Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.
Sometimes the way in is a song.
But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding,
and beauty.
To enter stone, be water.
To rise through hard earth, be plant
desiring sunlight, believing in water.
To enter fire, be dry.
To enter life, be food.
© Linda Hogan, “The Way In,” from Rounding the Human Corners. Copyright © 2008 by Linda Hogan. Reprinted by permission of Coffee House Press. www.coffeehousepress.org
Source: Rounding the Human Corners (Coffee House Press, 2008)
To order copies of Claire Bateman’s books, Wonders of the Invisible World, Scape, or Coronology from Amazon, click on the book covers below.
Claire Bateman
Claire Bateman’s books include Scape (New Issues Poetry & Prose); Locals (Serving House Books), The Bicycle Slow Race (Wesleyan University Press), Friction (Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize), At The Funeral Of The Ether (Ninety-Six Press, Furman University), Clumsy (New Issues Poetry & Prose), Leap (New Issues), and Coronology (Etruscan Press). She has been awarded Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Surdna Foundation, as well as two Pushcart Prizes and the New Millennium Writings 40th Anniversary Poetry Prize. She has taught at Clemson University, the Greenville Fine Arts Center, and various workshops and conferences such as Bread Loaf and Mount Holyoke. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina. (Please see Bateman’s amazon.com Author’s Page for links to all her publications, and go here for further information about the poet and her work.) (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)