Whispers from a Sunken World

It is a kind of swimming,
walking through these woods.
Greens still tinge the oatmeal coloured air,
and still there is the feel of floating: moats
caught in currents of high spirits
dancing where the light's rays
bring them into being; seeing
which way's up and which is down
when gravity stays mum
and tells the senses nothing.

Beetles scuttle silently away
like bottom feeders feeding on
the sandy bed. The banks
are dusky and mysterious.
The bed slopes down.
You cannot surface here
where water carves a hollow, stalls,
tracks back upon itself,
by-passes urgency
or is itself by-passed.

It is enough to realise
that here a sense of surface surfaces;
there is a lightening
where two worlds meet,
and that it reassures;
that limbs move freely here;
and that the water parts,
admits me to its inner sanctum,
then closes round me like a cloak,
behind me like a sphincter.

I am enclosed and cosseted.
A babble of white noise
descends from trees.
I think of brooks, white rivers,
summer rain. It sounds like speech,
but muffled by the water.
The bed slopes slowly upwards now,
the waters break, re-birth me
into a world more ill-at-ease
with me and with itself.
My soul takes on
the whispers from my sunken world
to travel back with me.
They will become its prayer.

The prompt at Poet's United's Thursday Think Tank #76 is The Soul's Whisper This is my submission for it.