Rivers and Bread Trees     

                          DF  09.26

 

When you’re ever lost,

remember: 

walk along a river,

and you will find another

 

Rivers were the first roads,

long shimmering corridors through forests,

fish flashing, game floating,

chestnuts drifting in a canoe’s hold

 

Where a river ran,

people settled,

water as survival:

drink, bathe, plant, fish, thrive

 

A riverbank was a neighbor’s doorstep,

a place toward another village,

to trade, to share, to be seen

and sometimes to learn what has been

 

I harp on these memories, so I do not lose them. 

 

A river was a guide, 

and every bend a promise of life,
fragile enough to break,
stubborn enough to wake

 

My rivers

Drini, Buna, Kiri taught me swimming

Hudson, how to dream

And Saugatuck, how to remain present

 

Ancient flows,

remembering more than a human time,

weaving our memories into them,

as hope does

 

Drini rolls,

to meet pristine Buna and alpine Kiri,

at the footsteps of my childhood home

Little me, spared of the burden of wisdom,

gagged and giggled, and splashed,

not knowing the river would teach me to roam,

and how to leave,

and how to return home

 

Hudson wandered both ways for miles,

first named Muhheakantuck and Shatemuc,

holding tears of Lenape, Mahican, Algonquin, 9/11

Yet still lifting hope for Henry, for Lady Liberty,
for millions who arrived with trembling hands,
carrying what they could,
dreaming what they might

 

Saugatuck flowed out and nourished the Paugusett,

emerging Redding, Weston, Wilton, Westport,

submerging Valley Forge,

with the dam Samuel P. Senior

A whole village exchanging air for depth,

memory for breath

 

Rivers know how to lose and still begin again.

 

Chestnuts, older than my five rivers born of ice,

Sativa in Europa, Dentata in Turtle Island,

stood beside rivers, patient and wise

showing them the way even as their own forests died

 

Imagine that
Bread trees everywhere, since forever,
since Pliny the Elder gathered their stories,
trying to save what he could from time’s weather,
from the slow work of

forgetting

 

Imagine that

Mesolithic us eating what we still eat,

chestnut groves lining river valleys,

civilization rising from chestnut and river beat,

the old duet of hunger and hope

 

So, hold on tight to these memories

Rivers are not symbols of calm and beauty,

they are our original truth,

the first teachers of loss and return

 

Chestnuts gone from our banks

yet still on our Thanksgiving plates,

Villages gone from our maps

yet still carrying us home

 

Quiet survivors,
outlasting their own drowning,
What falls can rise again
What is lost can still find its way home