Where is the well of healing waters
in Bramshill Forest woodland?
Where does the hereditary path
yield to strips of logs
across water pools on rutted turf
by a sign to warn of ex-aggressive dogs
in rehab near the camping grounds?
And what in that compound
can add to the air of therapeutic pine
in the bluest January sky?
Can rusty water really heal,
rebalance the humours, calm the vapours
as it stagnates in congealed auburn pools
by a narrow bridge to Grays Farm?
Was melancholic black bile relieved
by mineral sample subtleties
or other forms of the impure?
Could an outer make an inner steel
and chemical compounds truly heal?
Do old dynamics of the past
realign, as if through cloudy glass,
the future’s clear, though yet to pass?
This muddied solution’s blotchy legacies
of rust, was royalty’s concentration.
Could they get from where the people live
to a mystical, short-lived chalybeate spring?
Not in linear, but vertical time,
does the past and future co-exist
by tree and rail in evergreen stillness?
But if we ignore the living
we pass on undulating paths
as Sunday light dissolves to dusk,
then what of the dead in the distant past?
Can any soul be said to last?
Alex Saynor
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