August 3, 2007

The River Sighs

Years and years of getting to
you pushed us by

Years and years of getting along
we sipped you dry

Year and years of getting over
ignored, you sigh

A strange meeting place for old friends
we heard your cry

Sorry for not calling ahead, sounded
like you wanted someone to say "Hi."

3 comments:

Brendon Etter said...

Message is pretty clear I think. People and the river, and the river can never be ignored.

Jim H. said...

The river through downtown looks so benign most of the time -- from shore or from a bridge. Its beauty belies its occassional malevolence. As your verse says, it is almost human.

Brendon Etter said...

We forget how powerful they are - rivers... our attempts to ignore them don't always work. Sometimes the river calls in its debts for all we have used it for.

Sorry, sounding Buddhist here, and I'm not mystical in that sense... just that this event, even though it really was about the bridge, evokes some powerful metaphors that remind us about our place in "controlling" nature as a condition of settling this land.

We have human intelligence fighting gravity and current.... the inexorable forces of both that have nothing but time on their side.