Poem

What Water Doesn’t Say

by: Beatriz Schlogl Barini

I. Denial 

 It slips through my hands—
but not because it’s gone.
Because it’s moving.
We called it reflection,
but water was always more than a mirror.
It was an eye.
A will.
A voice we couldn’t translate.

In a world that captures everything—
photos, hearts, disasters—
we built museums for moments,
monuments to meaning,
and called it preservation.

But what lives
does not stay still.

What is truly water?
Not just the shape it takes—
but the shape it refuses.
Not just a breath we borrow—
but one that chooses whether to return.

II. Anger

Why does it turn away when I reach?
Why won’t it hold form,
fit frame,
behave?

We pixelate its beauty.
Bottle its clarity.
Engineer dams, pipes, fountains—
draw borders in a wild place.

But it floods anyway.
Not out of malice—
out of memory.

Water has agency.
It enters.
It leaves.
It breaks through
not because it’s broken
but because we built walls it never agreed to.

It mirrors me,
but it’s not mine.
It knows me—
and still moves on.

III. Bargaining — If You Remember, Stay

 What if I pour my ache into it—
will it carry me?
I offer my grief like a prayer.
A file for it to store.
But water is no archive.

We invented archives.
We invented permanence.
But water remembers selectively—
just like us.

Should I let it go,
trust its leaving as a kind of love?
Or do I dam it, trap it,
make it constant—
and call that devotion?

But I know:
when you stop a river,
it stops being itself.

Don’t we ever
run back
to what we lost—
not to find it whole,
but to find ourselves
where we last felt real?

IV. Depression

Water doesn’t ask.
It listens
with ancient patience.

It carries our ruins,
filters our waste,
and still returns to us.

But when I stood at its edge
and it said nothing—
I wondered:
Did it remember what I did?
What we all did?

Why does it hurt?
Even though I never missed you,
never related to you?

Maybe water hurts too.
Maybe it avoids not out of cruelty,
but exhaustion.

It’s tired of being seen
only when it serves.
Tired of being worshipped
after the damage is done.
Tired of being inscribed in myth,
sung in odes,
while poisoned in silence.

Tired of carrying our grief
and being denied its own.

And still—
don’t we ever
run back
to what we broke?
Not to heal it,
but to see
if it still loves us enough
to let us try?

V. Acceptance

Water is not an idea.
It is not a metaphor.
It is not ours.

It is a body.
A traveler.
A witness.

It doesn’t explain itself—
but that doesn’t make it silent.
It sings through erosion,
writes in flood lines,
calls back in tides.

We built perfect systems to contain it—
canals, policies, maps—
and still, it leaves.

Because it remembers freedom.
Because it chooses truth over image.

It is not beautiful because we frame it.
It is beautiful because it refuses to be framed.

What is water?
It is alive.

And maybe that’s what breaks us—
that something so fluid
can have such a will.

That something we thought was ours
never needed us to be whole.

Maybe what makes it real
is not the way it serves,
but the way it resists.

Maybe grief is what we feel
when the living leave
on their own terms.

And maybe love—
the real kind—
is when we still
run back
to what we lost,
even knowing
it might not
wait.