Rivers
by 
Written by Stewart Acuff
Rivers with the names given them by native forebears:
The Obion, The Tallahatchie, even the Mississippi ran slow and muddy.
Filling the bottomlands around them every spring.
With their rich waters.
Protecting those bottomlands and their oaks, and hickory trees, and cypruses from those who would kill the bottoms to form the lands.
Those rivers protected lands and woods and trees for decades and generations from the loggers saws and the plows of farmers.
Those rivers flowing into the Mississippi didn’t rage, had no rapids.
But they held back false progress with a slow, steady power that ran on and on and on.
Slow, steady power.
© Creative Commons Copyright 2012
Tags: acuff, mississippi, poem, poems, poetry, prose, river, rivers, stewart acuff, stewartacuff
