I’ll rest a moment in your gentle flow
and listen to you sing about your origins,
the grandeur of your lofty glacier home,
pure white and sapphire blue before its margins
shrunk and gravel filled its mouth. You’ll end
your days, I fear, a pool of fetid water.
I too am on the way to hell, my friend.
My vision dim, my skin is hotter
than it ought to be but let’s forget our plight
and cool our ire in thoughts of past romance,
of handsome trout that shimmer in the light,
of lazy evenings watching mayflies dance.
Before I meet the river gods downstream
rock me in your arms and let me dream.
—
Cynthia Knorr is the author of A Vessel of Furious Resolve (Finishing Line Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in an array of poetry journals. After a career as a medical writer in New York City, she relocated to rural New Hampshire where she enjoys listening to the birds and tramping through the woods. She serves on the editorial staff of the poetry journal Touchstone, is a 2025 Best of the Net nominee, and was longlisted for the 2024 Sappho Prize for Women Poets.
