Body of Water (2022)

Christine Hansen

I am Blóðughadda the bloody-haired one, the third of Ran’s nine daughters

I am the freshwater of rivers, the giver of terrestrial life

My bloodied hair trails across the mountains and planes as I flow from the peaks to the sea

I am the creeks and streams that burble and gush

I am the great swathes of water that carve through rock

I rise as springs, course as rivers, still as lakes, sink as aquifers

as I gather and surge, meander and puddle in cycles of flood and drought

You know me as Viskan, Göta, Seine, Thames, Tiber, Nile,

Limpopo, Ganga, Yarra, Hudson, Mersey, Yangtze, a list of names beyond count - each onean obscuration defying my truth: that all water is one

I carry nutrients from the land to my sisters of the sea When I am clean

I flood and flush, spread and slow, surge and eddy but cannot be caught

When I am free

Once I meandered where the land folds lead me. I could break my banks to feed the wetlandsand swamps without fear of retribution

Today I have been wounded

I am forced underground, piped in straight lines, held back with dam walls. My wildness is gone and I am tamed

Once my gifts nourished the oceans

and my times of abundance spawned new generations of aquatic kin Today I have been wounded

My gifts no longer nourish, instead they kill. I am the cause

of my sisters’ sickness; my veins are sullied with pollutants, my banks festooned with plastics and junk. Dog shit, bullet casings, drinking straws, bottle tops, sweet packets, toothpaste tubes, polystyrene, cigarette butts, car parts, shopping trolleys, furniture, industrial dyes, petrochemicals, fertilisers, paint – all of the things that disap- pear from view in the worldyou walk through, they come to me and I carry them to the belly of my sisters. They are washed from gutters, dropped from bridges, funnelled through industrial drains into my never-ending flow

No thanks is offered for my endless generosity in receiving this dross into my sacred body

Once your devotions included gifts of coins and metal objects, shrines, ritual emersions,sweetly sung prayers. Today you discuss me in engineers’ reports. I am diminished. Me, the giver of life, my pure waters sullied and shamed

And then they are gone

Remember my name when you drink me, bathe in me, dam me, channel me

I am Blóðughadda, the bloody-haired ancestor daughter and you are my children

I give you life

~

Snorre Sturlson’s Skáldskaparmál tells us that Rån is the ancestor mother of the sea. She is the fierce face of the ocean, the creator being who snares drowned sailors in her net and drags them into her watery underworld to sit at her feasting table. Rån is married to Äger and they have nine daughters, the skerry-brides. Blóðughadda is third of the nine.