Video made by: Graeme Mills

river song

 By: Norah Brady

in middle school I watched as we pulled a river up from the earth like a ribbon,

day by day, brown and silky, slow with sediment, the color of all things living,

and it was said by someone somewhere: today we return a piece of our tapestry to the sky,

today the steady construction of dirt has announced itself reborn

like all the molten slow progress of this world

like every gas station street concrete ripped up across the sidewalk for something new

but this was the kind of wound that time could ignore

and we coaxed a river from the ground anyways

//

and yes, history winds its way along water, a testament to time pumping

through the ground we walk on 

Earth, this rock, hailed meteors down from their planetary lanes,

lucky bombardment

after all we are

a cosmic magic trick spinning on the thumb of all that we would not survive

what water we have was never ours to begin with, nor the dinosaurs, not anyone after or before

it is all the prehistoric plasma, every moment and before stretching back into what we have no name for

it’s heirloom, is what I’m saying, passed down from generation to generation, it has filled the hands of our distant ancestors, and our cousins in becoming sentient gathered along streams

here:

the water with eons inside of it

the water protected

the water wasted

the water given less than a thought

the water precious

the water a knife in its absence 

//

this is a happy poem. yellow buoy buoyant. a barricade is brought from Florida.

make visible the mess: the turtles sitting on the carapace of commerce, our flotsam bubbling up into the balance

that we could even wish those dinosaurs gone

and wouldn’t that bother you, another skipped note, like every rest infesting the orchestra of our planet 

what would the last turtle say to you with its eyes? 

but this is a hopeful poem, like every song in the ruins of a city

this is a poem that knows how fragile our plenty is

how abundance is a lie we tell ourselves to feel safe 

and safety is a myth we use to avoid the responsibility

of living in such a fleeting place, a moment even I have taken for granted

A big thank you to our wonderful volunteers who made the cleanups possible!