Poetry: A Riff Off The River

A friend – Willeena – has been sharing some lovely poems on X, tagging it with the #writeout hashtag (she and I and others are part of the team planning Write Out 2023 in October). Her poems are situated in nature, and she has been adding short videos, too, of where she is getting her inspiration. A poem she wrote yesterday inspired this poem of mine.

She wrote, as part of her poem:

Help them move
past the mirk and mire …

— Willeena Booker
https://twitter.com/WilleenaB/status/1693989524442055138

I took that idea and wrote my way forward.

Summer rains stretch
fingers into the bottoms
of the riverbed,

a weathered troublemaker
stirring up what’s long been
settled in

With eyes closed, then,
we slumber along
through cloudy waters,
dreaming of currents
and clarity

Then stuck feet find
a footing, and a hand
reaches from the shore –

Once more, your presence
provides ballast
in an otherwise
unbalanced world

Peace (and poems),
Kevin