'‘Gold Divers’ by Leah Larwood feels mythical, fresh and strange. I was completely seduced by this epic and folkloric sequence.' - Malika Booker, 2019 Women's Poetry Competition Judge.
Gold Divers
Your heart and my heart are very,
very old friends ~ Hafiz
Cadence had a tendency to lie down
in the middle of the road to think.
It was the one place she found Hope –
the one other mother that felt like her.
Each mother was chin-deep in childhoods:
their own, their child’s, that webbed space between.
Speaking in tongues, the women occasionally levitated
every time they had a certain kind of dream.
They both awoke at the same time.
A hand in each other’s pocket, they walked for eons.
*
Everything can be illuminated by water,
or most things.
At day raw, in the unkempt darkness
the two women knelt by the lake and
submerged their entire heads and shoulders;
the lakebed spoke back to them.
What sung to them was their whole beings
like autumn’s dusky melancholy.
**
Everything they didn’t know they wanted
was there, buried weather under water.
They turned to each other, eyes like Neptune
and kissed. Each diving deeper,
they pulled out their six year old selves and
sacks of hidden treasures covered in algae.
They emerged steadfast and dizzy,
two entirely whole beings, at large.
***
On their way back to their husbands,
they walked straight into a place
with broad grins, pink gin, silence
and the strange narrow vision of it all.
It wasn’t even a bar, more of a broom cupboard
pressed up against blue velvet wallpaper.
They opened their sacks onto the table
and everything spilled out.