Do the old gods laugh?

At the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads, Kerry asks us to think of the old gods and goddesses.

In his sonnet, ''The World is Too Much With Us", Kerry sees Wordsworth bemoaning the fact that we have lost our place in the natural environment, and no longer appreciate the gods in nature.

                  Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Kerry provided us with a link to the old Celtic deities, and I tried to feel something for some of them, but my poem brought me back, not to the land of my Celtic forefathers, but to the shores of my birth...British Columbia's Fraser River, and the Pacific Ocean.

My father, Gordon Davies, wrote books about the rivers of British Columbia, and he was known to mention river gods now and then, but this poem is my own.

Taku chief, Tlingit people,
1913

the water gods, we knew them well

we learned them at our father’s side

they kept harpies from the streams

held back the ice from oceans wide

  

the river gods the Haida knew,

the Salish and the Kwatna, too,

fished and fought in wood canoes

  

Celtic gods, First Nations gods,

all protected salmon streams:

Icaunis and Arausio, knew fish

Bill Reid's carving of the
Haida god Raven
releasing the first humans
from a seashell

were stuff of people’s dreams

  

the river gods my father knew

taught him the things

he taught us, too

Kay Davies, September 18, 2013

Photo source: Wikipedia