National Poetry Day 2016 - prayer from a lady angler

Especially for National Poetry Day, here is a beautiful piece that speaks to fly fishing and breast cancer from lady angler Margot Page, one of the founders of Casting for Recovery in the States:

Prayer - Margot Page – (Little Rivers: Tales of a Woman Angler)

I ache for sunlight. For health to jump from rock to rock.
To walk without having to sit down and rest, as has been the
case, increasingly, for several years now. Two surgeries in four
months…..
What do I want? I want time to pass. I want to heal, to fast-
forward a few months. I want the trees to fatten their buds, to
swell and then erupt in lime-green eroticism. I want the world
to fill and my body to forget its scars and the deep gnawing
night pain.
And I want to hear the melody, that pure line of flowing
water, to be back in the elemental, the green. A rock
underwater blurs and runs with quiet rusts and beiges: the
Battenkill flowing over marble and granite distorts and
enlarges their images. The water is so cold it catches your
breath, for it starts its voyage as ice and snow in the
mountains, tumbling and fresh and ceaseless over the rocks,
until before you know it the crest of spring is gone, the melts
now blended into the Hudson, en route to the ocean. To merge
and be gone. Like us all.
Let me have the green and the blue for a little while longer.
Hold my hand.



Casting for Recovery UK and Ireland supports ladies as they move forward from breast cancer using a combination of counselling, medical advice and fly fishing. Our residential retreat programme for 2017 will be announced shortly. The charitable programme is run by The Countryside Alliance Foundation with support from Orvis UK.