Where We Come From

a poem about the many names of water

Where We Come From
                    after Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer,
                                         Where We Are Headed

Once a wild ocean round as the earth covered us 
in its singular wet dress. 

I walk to the nearby creek looking for it, touch my 
fingers to the brook leaping from the stacked stones, 
the trickling rill, the rising seep, the young puddle. 
It is nowhere. 

Here the rivulets are doing the patient work of 
becoming stream, who never dreamt of the caged 
reservoir. It is everywhere, gathered

as island lakes, in shallow lagoons, in still ponds. 
Fractured into many names, living kintsugi rivers 
threading the broken world, veining into inlets and 
coves, into arroyos and deltas, as ravines, and that 
glacier of a word that carves through the cliffs of our 
cheeks; fjord. And the marshes too, and the swamps, 
the bogs who speak of the forgotten. 

Always when I open the faucet I am looking for our 
great mother, I am awash with gratitude, wondering 
if ocean recognizes itself in the sink basin, as harbor 
and bay, as canal, as the steady drip of tear to cheek, 
as the pools of the eyes looking out, drinking in all 
that light, as rain dreaming of again becoming 
estuary, of becoming gulf, becoming sea, and again

I am fluid breath. And again I am one tide tugging 
and lapping, one wave rising and crashing, one drop 
entering, remembering I was never not water. 

- Moudi Sbeity

Photo by Matt Hardy on Unsplash

The topic of water names came up recently on a walk with a couple of friends. We arrived to a lake, as indicated by the sign, though it was small enough that we wondered why not pond? The discussion from there flowed into the many names of water based on shape, size or the container they are in. I thought of Alice Walker’s poem When You See Water. One my friends looked at me, and knowing me, said “I bet you are going to write a poem about this.” He wasn’t wrong. What surprised me at the end is how I was subconsciously influenced by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s poem Where We Are Headed, in where the world is fractured into the many names of flowers, and then everything is again just flower. I knew these poems had to be conversation, so I titled it with a nod to Rosemerry’s poem.

Seeing how this is the last post of 2025, I want to wish you an auspicious year ahead. May you flow into and out of your days with the confidence of a steady river. May the ground rise to meet you every step of the way. And above all, may this be the year we collectively awaken to the miracle of each other. What a world we would be in then. More possible than we know. Closer than our jugular vein (as it is said of Allah in the Quran). Ready to flourish with unbridled praise.

This year is in honor of Bird ❤️