The Dry River

The Dry River

The women’s cooperative built the sand dam without permission,
which is the traditional approach to the mission
of water management in a village where the water rights
belong to the authority that never comes through the nights.

The dry river became less dry behind the sand dam wall,
the dry river became a shallow pool in fall
and through the dry season, enough for the kitchen gardens,
enough to change the calculation of the hardened.

They built it from stones carried from the hillside over three weeks,
forty women working in the heat, each cheek
familiar with the specific sunburn of the effort,
the specific satisfaction of the self-made answer.

The water authority came and said the structure was illegal,
said it interfered with the downstream and the regal
rights of the riparian holders further along the system,
which is the legal language for someone else’s system.

The women said the legal outline was written by the absent,
written before the drying, written in a pleasant
year when the river was a river and the law made sense,
and that the law should follow the river in the present tense.

The structure stands, which is the outcome after a year
of negotiation and the authority’s quiet disappear-
ance from the dispute when the photos of forty women
building water made the paper and the human.