The Water Is Indifferent. We Never Have Been: Bath's Hot Spring, the Roman Curse Tablets, and Writing Against Forgetting

Beneath the Pump Room in Bath, water rises at forty-six degrees, more than a million litres a day. It fell as rain on the Mendips around ten thousand years ago, travelled three kilometres down into the earth's heat, and is only now finding its way back into the light. It has never once altered its behaviour on anyone's account. And for two thousand years, people have stood at its edge and asked it for things anyway. The Romans threw in coins, jewellery, and lead curse tablets — thin inscribed sheets addressed to the goddess Sulis. Around a hundred and thirty have been recovered, and they are almost unbearably ordinary: a cloak stolen from the bath-house, six coins from a purse, the names of everyone who might have taken them. The goddess did not intervene. The cloaks were never returned. But we can still read every word. This week's guest poem comes not from the canon but from a living young poet, Leila Lillian Dudmish, who has kindly allowed Alden to share her work. "Treasured You" is an elegy for her grandfather, Ronald Dudmish, built entirely from small physical particulars — a light blue shirt, a chuckle, a white t-shirt losing its scent. Her Instagram is leilalilliandudmish.work Alden then reads his own poem, "Bath," from Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry, and asks why the specific detail, not the general statement, is what makes an elegy last. Email a guest poem suggestion to [email protected] to enter the draw for a signed copy of Somerset In Verse - Exmoor To Levels In Poetry, sent by hand. New episodes every Wednesday at 6am.