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The River
by Garth Craven

From the sky the river is still.
Broad, brown, against the wet green of jungle.
Spread wide across its flat final flood plain.
All urgency gone.

No more the giggling rivulets
of creeks and streams that was its young beginning.
No more the youthful rush of rapids.
Careening tumble of cascades.
The headlong lemming-leap of waterfalls.
No more the thundering maturity of river
that brooks no obstacle,
taking all before it.
Now, still-seeming, it bears its browning load
of silt and sand and soil, as it must,
to the clear arcing line of surf
that marks the shift from brown to blue.
And I can see
where river waters cease to be.
and river changes into sea.

And we descend from sky to land.
All journeys sometime have to end.


 

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