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?