Lyrical flow

What better way to celebrate ten years than to capture canals and rivers in poetry? Canal laureate, Roy McFarlane, has done just that in ‘These are our Waters’, an epic ode to the heritage and healing powers of our waterways for everyone in our community. Waterfront went to meet Roy as he performed the poem to camera, along his local towpath in Birmingham.

From behind the scenes, we watch as in a deep deliberate baritone, Roy caresses every cadence of his opening stanza:

These are our waters. The boater, navigating veins that have pumped through this network for a quarter of a millennium, veins that fed an industrial revolution the beating heart of a colonial empire…

As Roy explains, it’s just the first of ten verses he’s performing today: “How do you sum up the whole story of canals in just one poem? I’d always been intrigued by how these waters fed into the industrial revolution and, good or bad, the links to colonialism and empire. And I liked the idea of the empire’s children coming back to the places that made them. I wanted to bring it full circle. Looking at communities, young people and women who are now reclaiming these waters as their own.” ‘These are our Waters’ deals with themes close to Roy’s heart. After all, he spent his childhood using the Black Country’s towpaths as a playground and once had a career in youth work and community development: ”When we were young, we would use canals as shortcuts and meeting points. Canals were a space that as young people we owned, even though we didn’t understand them. They were our freedom, our place to grow; the making of our youth. I wanted the poem to capture that.” During the pandemic, Roy spent a lot of time rediscovering the canals of his youth.: “These corridors of blue and green space were really key to me surviving lockdown,” he continues. “Family members were lost to Covid. Then there was the killing of George Floyd which had a profound effect on me as a black writer. I found real solace and inspiration in looking at canal nature through my poetry.”

These are our waters that will carry our sorrows. The bush and hanging trees catching our waiting dreams and waters will take our misery and herons will show you the joy of standing still, until the sun goes down.

“With nature, we should all be a part of it,” says Roy with passion. “Nobody should be excluded from it. It’s the rising of the sun that I want for everyone. It’s the walking with herons that I want for everyone. We’re all equal in nature. And humanity needs to know that.” As well as his 10th Anniversary poem, Roy is writing a whole series of works around water during his year-long stint as canal laureate, including four poems to mark each solstice. He says: “I always try to wake up for sunrise and see the sun come down on the longest day. From a pagan perspective, I love these junctions in time. And waterways mirror those seasons, capturing them in time.”

Has Roy learned a great deal by writing for these poems, Waterfront wonders? “I’ve come to understand how profound canals were to what Birmingham has become,” Roy explains. “Transporting raw materials into the city and finished goods out. Connecting the trade of the north of the south. And how we reclaimed our canals for leisure and tourism. Here we are now in Brindley Place. Somewhere I’ve walked through all my life and only now do I learn who Brindley was; a major figure in the building of canals!

I love how his canals still run through places like Ladywood, Winson Green and Smethwick. And how today communities are working hard so that people of all ages and backgrounds can uncover these stories and embrace their heritage.”

Lock keepers and heron watchers volunteers and community gardeners paddlers and wild water swimmers knit and natter to make it better this is the Super Slow Way these are our waters.

As we pack up the cameras, Roy reflects on the importance of waterways as a space for art: “Yeah, let’s celebrate that. If you are drawing, painting or writing poetry, you are capturing the beauty around you. If we want to preserve these waters and pass on their heritage to the next generation, then we need to capture them through art. And the canals will be loved. And people will come back to them. And people will know about them. And the next generation will take on the baton.”