Tania van Schalkwyk is a South Africa poet. Her debut collection, Hyphen, won the 2010 Ingrid Jonker prize for English poetry.
South Africa is celebrating National Water Week this week.
See also: National Water Week: Inspirational words of watery wisdom
Water
Thales said the world is made of water,
just water.
And looking at the sky
I notice how it falls
onto the ground,
the ground that shimmers with water inside
and flows into the earth below.
Everything is water.
Hypnotic, the world falls
like a dance
scattering limbs like raindrops around me.
And I swim back to the top
of a lighthouse
I once stood in as a child,
looking out through a huge cut-crystal eye,
mirrors smashed into spinning disco-balls, the world dances
across a fallen horizon
the waves fall down,
their crash cracked in the refracted glass,
I am seeing the world through a kaleidoscope.
It is a rainbow,
falling.
