Eight-line Poems

Coventry's River

Coventry’s River

My home town has a river, though you wouldn’t know it,
so shy and humble it is, rising as a crystal spring
in a field a short walk from my ancestral home,
carving itself a boundary ditch through parkland
to the city’s edge, then underground, unseen,
until it rises in a brief canal hidden in a back alley
and so, eventually, to the sewage works, to pay its dues
and be released and so become belovèd Sherbourne.


Line Count: 8
Free Verse
For Express It In Eight, October 5 2020
Prompt: River.
Note: The name Sherbourne is said to derive from Scir Burna, "clear stream" in Old English.