This might have been the spot,
in the eddy of a small boulder
where the water was slow enough, deep enough
that I might have entered the river
to cool off on a hot July Day,
as two white classmates
stood high above on its steep bank,
threw stones at me, and laughed,
the same place where I slept in a dorm on its bank
as the river sang me to sleep with its low roar.

Forty years later,
I have come two thousand miles to take my shoes off,
roll up my pants and stand in the Crystal,
its water so cold,
I can hardly stand in it.
In summer it will be warm enough to swim in, again.









But for now, I sift my bare, frozen feet through soft red sand
that was not here when I was sixteen.
Once the river bottom was a bed of colored agates
washed down from the mesas and mountains.
Though the Crystal runs as wild as the day it began
it, too, has aged.
But it still swirls around the rocks and boulders in its way.
just as I have learned to do.

Some things do not change.

I remember the river.

It is raining on the paper I am writing on.
Soon it will be gone
and all that I have written.

Brandywine
5/10/02

Previous Poem | Brandywine's Poetry | Next Poem

Send comments to hchang at bway dot net

Copyright ©2002 by Han-hua Chang.