What the Water Carried Without Permission

The water spoke, and I, unworthy, could not parse its long reply—
the grammar of the stone, the syntax of the sky,
the way it etched its questions through the flanks of sleeping rock,
the way it hoarded centuries—cathedraled, columned, locked.
It never asked our lineage. It never bent to king or creed.
It passed through empires, sovereignties, through famine and through greed.
It wore the weight of ages like a garment made of light—
a shimmer, then a dissolution, a refracture of the night.

One season, it was pillaged. Not by drought, not by the sun—
by concrete and by calculation, by men who measured ton by ton.
They raised a wall of grey and steel to stultify its current, still its tongue,
to render its anointment to a waiting, to defer what it had sung.
The river left no testament, no grievance, no appeal—
just sediment that fissured like a scripture, like a seal,
just branches leaning into emptiness, just avians that sang in vain,
just my father, motionless, his sorrow an indelible stain.

He spoke no more. The river's name became a hushed refrain.
He watched the dust—as though the dust could resurrect what had been slain.
I fled, because I could not remain where water had been drained;
I sought the cities where the rivers moved through conduits of the ordained.

But metropoles could not instruct me in what the water knew—
that nothing truly perishes that once refused to skew.
That water learns to linger, to endure the dark, to reappear,
that silence is not absence—it is what the rhizomes fear.

I returned. Not with fervour. Not with hope—just with a need
to ascertain if something could persist, if something could succeed.
The bank was verdant once again. The grass had found its wayward home.
And there, a filament of quicksilver moved—a river, now alone.

It did not seethe. It did not exalt. It did not seek redress.
It simply flowed, as if to say: “I am. I endure. I impress.”
I knelt. I placed my palm upon its cool, returning breath—
and apprehended that what survives, survives despite of death.

The wall will fracture. The stone will crumble. The dam will learn to yield.
Not because we petitioned it—but because the earth is healed.
The river does not require statutes, nomenclature, or decree—
it simply is. And what it is, no edifice can ever efface.