His fingers tell water like prayer.
He hears its voice in the silence
through fifty feet of rock
on an afternoon dumb with drought.
Under an old tin bath, a stone,
an upturned can, his copper pipe
glints with discovery. We dip our hose
deep into the dark, sucking its dryness,
till suddenly the water answers,
not the little sound we know,
but a thorough bass too deep
for the naked ear, shouts through the hose
a word we could not say, or spell, or remember,
something like “dŵr... dŵr.”
by Gillian Clarke
from Letter from a Far Country (1982)
Dŵr means 'water' in the Welsh language.
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Rambling At The Bridge Head 