I think I always heard her whispering, eyes peering at me like a frog from under the skin of her water. We human beings had largely fallen out of favour and maybe she had dismissively treated us as if we were weeds…but she had let us grow you see.
And since I was small I have felt her shivering there, just in the corner of my view. This animal vision untrained but an imagination that just managed to catch her whispers. And now I hear her screaming.
She is able to manifest in those liminal places that have long been special, for they are magical. Everything is more powerful at its edges, for edges are the places where meetings between things can happen. So here she becomes tangible.
And at some point, mankind had killed so many things that the whole river became a Rusalka. In the year 2020 every river in the UK is horribly polluted, we have killed our waterways. A toxic relationship between humanity and environmental element has turned murderously violent and the river, she now haunts me.
‘Please listen to what I have to say before it is too late. It was not my time to die and I still hold the hope that some weeds are only precocious flowers that have decided for themselves the best place to blossom…’
She flows into my dreams in the surrender of night and I let her kiss my toes. I can feel her ebb and flow in the tiny tide that lives inside me.
In the black flow at her centre, smelling of centuries of sodden earth and algae Jenny Greenteeth floats, her nose blowing gently plinking bubbles as her mouth moves slowly beneath the surface, her long sinuous arms languidly lifted by the current, bony fingers feeling its movement as she waits for the right moment to join the conversation.
…pl-iiin-k, Plinnnn-k, splooSH plllink gurrrgG-Ggle pliP…
I wonder if she will find her voice or if I will just have to learn how to hear her music properly. She seems to have gone through and entire age of being misunderstood.
And there, trying to hide but unable to conceal her delicate radiance, Blodeuwedd nods sleepily behind a willow tree, set at a teetering angle that allows its trailing branches to softly stroke the water. She does not snore but sends gentle puffs of sweet smelling pollen into the air, picked out faintly by the silver light of the full moon. At every point where her body meets the floor small flowers have started to blossom and wild strawberries unseasonably gather and swell at her bare feet.
I sit quietly and take it all in. Although it seems peaceful there is a cold hard hum of fear and anger in the night air and I get the sense I must take the time time to listen harder. These elementals would like to have a word and it seems I am the only person here to hear them in this moment. But then I realise that you, you are here with me of course! And I wonder… Would you like to try to talk with them too? Or are you content with me just translating?
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