Click play below to listen to a reading of this poem by the author.
I do not know much about gods, but I think that the river is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable…reminder of what men choose to forget.
T. S. Eliot
The Dry Salvages
The heavy gray sky does not relent.
The late spring deluge punishes us all.
but still we bend our backs,
passing sandbags,
setting them high and firm
along the levee wall,
feeling the burn
of tortured shoulders
against the biting chill
of rain-drenched coats and sweaters.
We are at least a hundred,
maybe one twenty.
Each of us wordlessly hefting the canvas bags
and dropping them in place.
But for every inch we build it up
the river rises an inch and a half.
And all along the levee
friends and neighbors we cannot see
glance over frozen wet shoulders
at the homes that will
surely be sacrificed this day
or at best the next.
And as the first small trickles
begin to appear
beneath and between the sandbags,
there comes a cry upriver
and the distant rush of moving water
out of sight in the gray dawn.
It has begun
and we cannot win.
The river does not hate.
It does not acknowledge or empathize.
It does not know mercy.
It simply is.
Like our town is.
But unlike our town,
the river is eternal.
it will be here tomorrow
and the next day
long after our town has
slipped beneath the waters
and we have fled for
higher ground.