Listening to the River

(found poem)

A river seems a magic thing.

A magic, moving, living part

of the very earth itself.

To put your hands in a river

is to feel the chords

that bind the earth together.

In the rhythm of the lifeblood of the Earth

the river delights to lift us free,

if only we dare to let go.

A river sings a holy song

conveying the mysterious truth

that we are a river.

Know that the water has wisdom

in its motion through the world.

We are liquid. We share water’s wisdom.

How could drops of water know themselves

to be a river? Yet the river flows on.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

The river has taught me to listen.

The river knows everything.

If we are ignorant of this, we are lost.

I choose to listen to the river,

thinking river thoughts,

before joining the night and the stars.

For dVerse Poetics — It's Quotable

The prompt was to use a quotation as inspiration and incorporate it into the poem. This poem is all quotations, found at "River and Environmental Quotations" at the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System website. Some of the quotations are unchanged; others have omissions for poetic reasons, and some have been mixed together. (Many wonderful ones were regretfully not used because they would have interfered with the coherence of the poem.) The authors, more or less in sequence, are Laura Gilpin, Barry Lopez, Anonymous, Richard Bach, Thomas Moore, Eric Alan, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Langston Hughes, Herman Hesse and Edward Abbey — but you'll have to check the website to match quotes to authors exactly.