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Friday, September 21, 2012

RIVER VOICES

The Flint River surges along its journey a mere three miles from the farm where I grew up.   The town of Newton, Georgia lies along its banks and the old Newton Bridge used to be the object of great trepidation when we would drive over it.  One-lane and ramshackle (or so it sounded) it always caused us womenfolk to worry that a truck would come our way and force us into the muddy depths.  "Don't look down," my mother would warn.  What might we see if we did?

This poem, in the ancient Persian form of the ghazal, explores that obsession with the river.  The first in  a series I hope to write about the Flint, it introduces some of the obsessive imagery I've carried with me over the years.  This poem appears in the current Pembroke Magazine.



River Voices

           " ...  say the  past is a muddy
river"
                                       
                                                     -- Evie Shockley

When  she lowers her hands to the river
she feels many dead voices translating river.

Her fingers turn cold, but her lips part,
as if, like a hooked  fish, she longs for the river.

Don’t look down, her mother warned; shifting
the Ford into second gear, crossing the river.

The drawbridge’s rusty spine still rattles
memories she tries to dredge from the river.  

Old men cast their histories into the depths
she can’t reach.  Stories keep shape-shifting over the river.

The trees keep their roots to themselves;
but they let their reflections be stroked by the river. 

When she hears the cricket frogs singing,
she wants to lie down on the banks of the river.

Come night she hears voices.  A drunken brawl.  Somebody
cursing the day he was born.  Somebody trying to drown in the river.

The backwater nags at her.  Dare she strip 
down to the bone and walk barefooted into the river?











3 comments:

Catherine Carter said...

Nice--love the trees letting their reflections be stroked by the river! :-)

Prairie Woman said...

I don't live on the Flint but very near. Went to Spruel Bluff park in the summer and place charge quartz crystals as a gift to the river spirit. Want to do this for more of the rivers in Georgia.

Glenda Beall said...

Coming from Albany, I grew up near the Flint River. As a small child I loved seeing the river as we crossed the old bridge going into town. The Flint was brown and wide there,and the eddies fascinated me.I remember hearing of people who drowned in the Flint, and I always wondered why did they go in that brown river anyway. I'm not sure if I was afraid of it because I was warned the river was dangerous, or if crossing the bridge, seeing the rushing water at times just made me afraid.
Later in life I boated down the river and found it peaceful and quiet.