Five Points, Vol. 21, No. 3
Sample Content
Frank Klaassen
Unless You’ve Walked for Water
Unless you’ve walked for water, had
to calculate how much you need to live,
to cook or bathe,
you will not understand.
Unless you know that fountains
began as wells, and how the rich
made them their own,
wrote their names in marble
round the flowing water.
How the water flowed away for show.
And unless you know that marble eyes
are empty the moment they are carved,
that water and life ineluctably
will choose their own way
in spite of all your craft,
that what mattered to those
who needed it was only the arc of water
and the bowl that temporarily
delayed its flow down into a filthy river.