Post #4066367

"Here, at this half-ass state park without a sign, with its cracked concrete bench and triangle of dying cottonwoods, the Missouri joins the Mississippi, meeting not like a ballet, or a twisting of silk scarves, but maybe like construction workers, shaking hands before a building forever half-built. And what is there to do now but love this unfinished work of the river, carrying everything it has ever been given: snow-melt streams like a cold bandana circling its neck, shreds of styrofoam cooler catching in its teeth, sturgeon eggs blooming with their translucent tails, nitrates, and phosphates, and soil glittering with bone, and this single mountain dew bottle eddying in a green-tinged foam, and the ashes of Oceti, reddening in all of our throats. I sit with my knees tucked to my chest, listen to the ducks call each other from either side of what will be the same water, and River, you and I both know that despite your dams, you will go on to grow deadly algae in the Gulf, to feed rich alluvial plants, shelter alligators and hellbenders and mudpuppies, to have done to you and to do the most beautiful and terrible things. We know the word end is never an end, but always a mouth instead." 'Confluence, after Standing Rock' by Teresa Dzieglewicz Taken from the collection Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency #Poetry #Bookstodon #Rivers #ClimateEmergency #Nature