River, O River! - pipTalk Forums

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WindWalker
Senior Member

since 2001-10-12

Posts 1218

0 posted 2008-03-04 09:40 PM

River, O River!

Cold, rainy, grey
Cloudy: dark and heavy
with hope:

I can feel the water
filling the hungry earth
beneath my bare feet

I can hear the River
rising between the rocks
in its parched bed

Soon she will cycle again
carrying her treasures
to the sea,
past all the obstacles
littering her way

she'll sweep them as always
contemptuously out of her way:

She can't understand evil:
the new power blocking
her appointed path of life:
the power of delusion: the greed
killing her flow, her life.

For eons, she has done her work
happy to serve,
providing the arms
which nurture and hold
for the salmon or
the lowly sturgeon,
the early man,
the wildlife on her banks:

She carries her treasures
wood, sand and algae

she guides the fish
to the salt sea she nurtures
with her flow.

But at her mouth,
steel giants have risen
to rob her of life
and kill her children:

They search and probe
they take away her treasures

Along her banks,
an anti-life has sprung,
a loveless, garish, angry growth
injecting its effluents
inside her veins

She feels the cold poison
of substances unknown to her,

She watches her children die
floating away forever gone
upon her waves,

her skin is cut by noisy beasts,
her children flee the surface
to die into her murky depths

If one were to listen
he'd hear
her whispered complaint
to her Creator:

Her questions mingled with her
age-old song
of grinding sands

If one were to pay attention,
he'd hear the answer
in the beating of the rain:

"Life was taken from the man
and the river fed her children
once more--in peace"

Amen!

Robert E. Jordan
Member Rara Avis

since 2008-01-25

Posts 8541
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

1 posted 2008-03-04 09:52 PM

WindWalker,

This is well organized. What river is this?

We are lucky here along the Delaware. No one messes with the river. It used to be horribly polluted, fourty years ago. Now it's taken care of, it's clean, the fish and I can swim in it.

Bobby

Marchmadness
Member Rara Avis

since 2007-09-16

Posts 9271
So. El Monte, California

2 posted 2008-03-04 10:39 PM

What a sad story WindWalker I know what you are talking about. My last trip to the Northwest made me very sad. I was remembering what it was like when I was a child.
Ida

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