Bridge: Chiswick
Title: Water language
Writer: Sinead Keegan
Creative partner: Lisa Andrews
The work: Hand cut and bound book with presentation box
Description: A handmade book with the lines of the poem tracing a repeating original linoprint of the River Thames and Chiswick Bridge. The book is Coptic stitched so that it lies flat, making it perfect for journalling, sketching and adding your own thoughts about the space around you.
WATER LANGUAGE
Sinead Keegan
Oars! Oars! Sculls! Oars!
The waterman’s cry echoes through the centuries’ mist
oars, oars, sculls, oars
slipping between ripples of the ebb tide.
Light horsemen hawk a lift on the wherries
Chiswick to Mortlake and back again.
‘Lightening flog it, up the Thames as swiftly jog it.’
Scullers in rowboats so shallow and tickle
great peril and danger, misfortunes and mischances for a cross of the Thames.
‘Some talk of building a fine stone bridge, but these things are yet in embryo.’
Still from Mortelage to Turnham Green the oars pull across the current
a lost lacu trickles down through time
a salmon returns upstream to spawn new memories.
‘Carroches, coaches, jades and Flanders mares,
Do rob us of our shares, our wares, our fares;
Against the fround we stand and knock our heeles,
Whilst all our profit runs away on wheeles.’
Pull! Pull! Echoes in the Portland arches
three for the river, two for the tow.
Oars away. Power in the water.
Let it run in the flood tide.
‘And one from tother hale, and pull, and teare,
And raile, and brawle, and curse, and ban, and swear.’
Listen for the voices in the flow.