Lauren Camp

Agua es vida. Water is life—and nowhere is this more present for me than in and around my home in the desert. Our use of that precious resource is intentionally restrained. 

I began “A Colloquy on Water” in 2009. It felt primal to write my immediate landscape into the poem, though I have gone on to do this a lot in my writing.

I think often about how easy it is to want one’s work to prove something, to lift off and land with a kind of moral, a shaking of a finger, a Don’t to follow. But that is unsuccessful. This reader never wants a lecture, and I’m certain I’m not alone in that. What we respond to as humans is perspective. Hopefully, a poem or other written work gives us the chance to feel into something, but that feeling is up to each reader to determine. 

“A Colloquy on Water” reaches out to a “you,” an unnamed individual who doesn’t know the desert. It offers a tour of care and worry. Each line is sound and land and hopefully extends far beyond these few acres to tracking a kind of environmental love. What is the element in your landscape that is desperately precious? We all have them. 

Over the years I’ve lived in the desert on the same plot of land, I have lost trees that didn’t get a good start. That didn’t, in truth, get enough water. This was a lesson, too. The drops we offered couldn’t sustain the growth and so, over time, we have learned to be a little bit freer with this resource. We have also learned about the trees that are water-suckers, claiming any and all water. In the past few years, we have, with great effort, removed some of those. We are in conversation with the land and its needs—every day, all the time, watching for signs, by color or gesture—that the flora is dissatisfied. Though this work comes first, writing my deep respect for the natural world and its more-than-human inhabitants is another way to save what I love.