Poem of the Week: "The Rivers" by Douglas Alexander Stewart

Stewart was a New Zealand/Australia poet who lived from 1913-1985. He might be third most favourite Australian poet, behind A.D. Hope and Kevin Hart.

The Rivers



Somewhere in the middle of the ocean every lost river
Sorts itself out, reassembles, each picks its own thread
With its one green hand like a wattle bending over.

They stretch out their long white flesh in the land of the dead,
They flush with their amber and green, they tremble with silver,
Then they begin to move in a waving of the weed.

Like a weaving of dancers they cross each other and double
While ruby-eyed fishes stare in the huge dim hush.
It is no fable at all, of course they are able-

Impossible ever to think that creek of the bush
That knew itself through and through, each pebble and bubble,
By fern and wattle and moss so sure in its rush,

Should crash and go down to the arms of the great bull-kelp
Forty feet long, to strangle in leathery streamers,
For ever lost in the darkness crying help help;

Impossible the might Murray rolling through summers
With half a continent caught in its mind asleep
In mile upon wild blue mile should shatter in the combers,

Diffusing to a vast grey mist. But they find themselves
Again, yes they do, and now they begin to travel
Out of the mist, up from the strangling caves.

Shaking the saltwater off like bright-green gravel
Before them lies the world's width under the waves.
Some may be found far south beneath the level

White paddocks of ice-floes, rubbing like shadows of whales
Their backs on the icebergs; they think it strange beyond knowing
That the big white rocks are afloat; but the stream that steals

In the gardens of coral, northward and sunward flowing
Like a ray in the water, rippling, on ghostly sails,
Where orange and purple, all in the ocean glowing,

Butterflies and flowers of weed and rock and fishes
Flash like the colours of summer across his mind,
Thinks he is back on earth; and so when he wishes,

So do they all when there's no more to find,
They do go back; where first the ocean washes
A river's bright eyes blind with surf and sand

They feel through the waves with their hands, they find their own course.
Their rushing children push them away from the valley
But now is their hours, they leap, like rainbows they force

The arch of their currents high where starshine is stony
Streaming across the sky to the snow and the source;
And laughing they plunge once more on the same wild journey.