Carved into the pavement of Milson Street, Bath UK, is a poem by British poet Alyson Hallett.

Encountering the words is surprising in the otherwise mundane act of walking down the street; it makes the poem an event—an act of discovery to the passerby. Its graceful script and waving lines draw the eye into a reading experience, as the poetry is seen to flow in the stone underneath and around you.

Befitting its ancient watery seat, the poem is called ‘Source’. It’s one of a series of works in Hallett’s international poetry-as-public-art project, The Migration Habits of Stones. Hallett explains of the Bath instalment: ‘I wanted people to feel that they were being spoken to in an intimate way... to feel a sense of wonder literally arising from the stones beneath their feet.’

Within its imagery is an uplifting call to the joyful, human acts of creation and self-fashioning—arts that ‘spring’ from the ‘source’ of all life, the natural world.

Source
by Alyson Hallett

From a crack in a rock a river springs
And sings its way to the ocean
Arise from the earth like water
Give birth to your sacred dreams
This world’s an ocean of mirrors
An invitation to create and be seen
Heron trout oak stream rain
Horse fossil moon stream fire
Flesh blood mountain salt
Songs of the heart's desire