Lit Up
The River Knows Us
Free Verse
I stand on the bank, the river’s tongue
lapping at the roots of my existence,
its whispers curling around my ankles, pulling
me into the dance of water and earth,
the silt beneath my feet a memory, a murmur.
Time here is a slow-moving current,
each moment a sediment of forgotten dreams,
our desires scattered like leaves
that drift and drown, reborn in the mud.
The wind carries the scent of yesterday,
a promise half-remembered, a ghost of what was,
mingling with the sweet rot of fallen fruit,
each breath a testament to the cycle,
an elegy for the impermanence we deny.
The trees stand silent, sentinels of our folly,
their branches reach for the sky,
a supplication, a question unanswered,
each leaf a story, each knot a wound
we refuse to acknowledge, a scar we hide.
And I, a wanderer in my own life,
a shadow cast by the setting sun,
linger in the twilight of understanding,
grasping at the threads of what it means
to be human, to love, to lose, to be lost.
In the ripple of the river, I see faces,
reflections of moments, fragments of self,
echoes of laughter, shards of sorrow,
a mosaic of the lived and the living,
the seen and the unseen, the spoken and the silenced.
We are the river, the stones worn smooth,
the fish that swim unseen, the reeds that sway,
each of us a part of the whole,
a note in the symphony of existence,
our voices harmonizing in the cacophony of life.
The river knows us, knows our secrets,
holds them in its depths, carries them
to the sea, to the vast unknown,
and I, standing on the bank, understand
that to be human is to be part of this flow,
to accept the journey, to embrace the uncertainty,
to find solace in the knowing that the river
will always return, will always sing,
even as we fade, even as we become
one with the water, with the earth,
with the endless, eternal song.
I stand on the bank, the river’s tongue
lapping at the roots of my existence,
and I whisper back, my voice a ripple,
a promise, a prayer, a surrender.
In the end, we are all rivers,
flowing towards the same sea,
our paths winding, merging, diverging,
but always, always moving,
always becoming.
And as the sun dips below the horizon,
casting shadows long and deep,
I know that the river will remember,
long after we are gone, it will carry
our stories, our essence, our truth,
to the ocean, to the infinite,
to the end, and beyond.
In the river’s song, I hear the answer,
the simple, profound truth:
we are here, we are now,
we are everything, we are nothing,
we are the river.
Ani Eldritch 2024
