Prophecy of My Scorned River

My river does not relent.

She is older than your trespasses

and remembers the time before your kind pillaged her youth.

She remembers the minnows tickling her feet

and the frogs singing liturgy from the chapels of her reeds.

She kissed the slender ankles of deer,

and bathed the newborn sun in the basin of her palms.

But that was before she drowned our rooftops

and ferried us like paper boats.

Before she dragged the carcasses of summers too long, too bright, too blistered

with human hubris to be anything but unholy.

We deem her the beldam of the floodplain.

Blame her moon for tugging too hard,

berate her rain for coming on too strong.

But she has seen the reckoning to come.

She’ll remember how our monstrous mouths

wring the wretched into her veins.

And still, we pave her banks,

choke her tributaries with our plastic prayers

We say it was a bad year, an anomaly.

The sea didn’t mean to flow that far inland.

We blame the weather as if it were wild without fair warning.

But I’ve watched glaciers melt.

I’ve heard the cries of butterflies and saber-toothed cats.

I’ve felt her belly bloat just to birth the dead.

We scroll past her obituary,

ignore the daily weather report,

and teach our children to fear her turning tides

without explaining why they are rising.

For years, she begged us to listen to her pleas.

But we wanted more:

more malls, more meat, more miles per gallon.

We wanted oranges in January

and strawberries in the snow.

We wanted a world that bowed to us.

And maybe, if she groveled nicely enough,

if she played the part of the pretty puddle,

we’d let her have April 22nd,

slap a leaf on a tote bag,

buy a reusable straw,

and pat ourselves on the back.

But my river is the baptism we never earned.

She is the crimson of the blood staining your hands,

She is the day of judgement.

And my river ripples, and runs, and babbles, and breaks,

but the one thing she will never, ever do

is forget.