I am now the empty river bed. My surface is a plain of stoic plateaus, isolated by paths of great etched canyons. I crumble when touched and am dry between green splendor and you walk over me as a mockery of my past. But beneath my surface, I am thriving. A roiling mass of life, tumbling and twisting together, a tapped mine for the vegetation surrounding me and paradise for those I house. My beauty is in my action, in my compounding existence, stable and constant and nourishing. While I am the feastful ground beneath your feet, I am also the trees at my banks, the grasses in my sands, the birds in my air. I flood through the body of my world and through me it returns. We blend and blur and through my vulnerability I bring them life.
And I am now, this same river bed, decades in your future, when the sun has eaten my moisture, the plants drained my soils to dirt, and my roiling earth becomes silent. I am that echo under the bright sky where birds gather and people march, my cracked basin the skin of the earth. In my contemplation, I watch the world settle and shift, as trees fade into bushes into grass into sand, as my view ebbs, mountains swaying into forests into lakes into deserts, and all the while we hum together with the birds overhead and the critters of the ground and I am home to as many as I ever was.
And I am now the barreling river that precedes and comes next. The great crash of rain as it plummets like rock fall. The churn of the floor where dirt and water coil to make clay to be sculpted into the latest creature to join this wide storm. Swimming through my waters. The banks bend and break and I spread across the plains and mark out where new landforms will grow. The honeycomb ridges that once were my surface, drink up the water and prepare for new seeds. Churning that’s rhythmic; out, down, and under, racing to see which tree I find first.
I am the dry bed, and the river that it once was, and the desert that it can be, and the rainfall that feeds it. I observe life around me, channel life within me, and become life that spreads to each surface I touch. The tree and the grasses and the birds and the earthworms, all that I feed, and that are me, themselves. I am the antithesis of isolation when I, as myself, am everything else there is.
Written November 2023
Cover image by Keagan Henman
Nature Poetry, Nature Poem