Thirteen-year-old Ide Crawford has won the Betjeman Poetry Prize 2018 and the Alan Garner Writing Competition 2016, and has been shortlisted for the Young Walter Scott Prize. She is Poet Laureate of St. Pancras Station. She is currently working with the Blacken Trust to set up an open project exploring the way creative writing can be rooted in locale. She writes prose as well as poetry and has recently completed a children’s time-slip novel exploring the secret history of two mysterious places. Ide’s favourite things are sunsets, twisted tree trunks, thunderstorms, snowdrifts, and dusty books. She tweets about nature and folklore at @mytangledgarden.
Song of the Naiad
We sing our song of rise-rush-ring and spiral-sweep-spill
Of dip-down-ripple and fast flow-fill
Of wept water and whispering weed
Of sound-smooth rocks and silver speed
Of moss-fold and light-fold and shade-fold
Of tingling toes and cutting crisp call cold
Of bright bends and bubbles and broken-blue
Of sweet-sun-shafts that go tumbling through
Of stream-curve-carved seats
Of cold-quickened heartbeats
Of races where water is winning
Of sky-snatches spinning
Of on-rush, down-pull
Fast and full
Down-pull
Rise-rush-ring, spiral-sweep-spill, dip-down-ripple, fast flow-fill
Tingling toes, broken-blue, sweet-sun-shafts, spiral-sweep-spill
Weed, wept-water, crisp-call cold, silver speed, fast flow-fill
Fill, flow, fast flow-fill, ripple-down, sweep-spiral, dip – spill
We sing our song of all this, and more,
From the stream will this music pour
From the stream this music thrill
The music of water-spill and heart-fill
Water-spill, heart-fill
Ide Crawford