WORDS AND PICTURES WATER The most pure and sacred creature on earth. Source of all creation. Give of hope. Tender to the land since the birth of time. Simple yet complex; common yet most prized. The holiest of all our possessions. Bearing fresh. Born upon a single tear, succouring the earth, her dependent child. Divining all growth from oceans to clouds, from flowers to forests, from fish to men. Painting even the skies with her splendour. Nourishment to the world. Nature herself. Liquid life. Andrew Wallis 1992 (Lower Sixth)
HEMP How carefully I've shaped you in the solitude of days. How peaceful in my mind entwined in and around my fingers. How sweet the days I've marked in knots I've tenderly caressed. So many times I've touched you, reached you, teased you. Now fingering these veins of hemp, their hair upon my skin. And how gently, quickly you will sleep. Slip into my collection with its bristles, coils, intentions. Yet your words will be unfruitful before I set you free. Slip as life is bound to slip from this empty disorder, then tied and laid upon the floor in perfect symmetry 'til the frayed edge of your lips on mine positioned, placed at ease once more. 'Til this restlessness returns I turn and turn and turn again. Andrew Wallis, 1993
EARTH The pregnant grass gave a heaven-scented sigh, as she sucked upon the sun's lazy beams: while a fresh cloud of blosson on the sky wafted forth, as upon some sun-kissed dream. Bumble-bees fumbled over flimsy flowers, hungry for honey in the August heat; and summer smiled on her drunken workers, lapping up sugar with their hairy feet. Summer haze dripped from the air, softly down the blue sky to the fresh pastures below. The loving sun kissed nature's womb, to drown in heaven, a garden of ecstatic woe. Andrew Wallis, 1993 Andrew was awarded the Skrentny Prize for Creative Writing. 42
