I was reading words by the contemporary American lyrist
poet Gregory Orr from his 2013 poetry collection “River Inside the River”. A passage about rivers made me stop and
look from the deck of my house to the Colorado Rocky Mountains. They look
different with their barren peaks. The snow that melts from these mountain
ranges becomes rivers, becomes the expected. Not this year.
Orr wrote
“I
want to go back
To
the beginning
We
all do.
I
think:
Hurt
will not be there.
But
I’m wrong.”
They say rivers cannot go back. I wonder if they do
not want to go back. To the source, to the high mountains where the snow wait
to be melted. To the meadows where deer and quail welcome sunsets as a promise
for new, warmer rays. Perhaps rivers do not go back as wrote K. Gibran, and
they might tremble before entering the ocean fearing it will disappear. But
they know they have to become the ocean, because rivers do. Or perhaps because
they have been there already, and their return cannot efface the pain they had
left behind.
They say the oak tree lives in the acorn. I wonder
if that tree drops acorns where part of itself will live again. In respect to
where it came from. As a responsibility protected in the shell of time.
James Allen wrote in his 1903 masterpiece “As a Man Thinketh” about life’s flow:
“The greatest
achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and the
highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of
realities.”
They say the song of sirens falls on deaf ears. I
wonder if unwaxed ears fear the sirenas’ songs before they hear them. And
after.
Sirens destroy our ships on the rivers leading to
the seas. Odysseus wanted to hear those songs, but asked his sailors to tie him
to the mast and for all to plug their ears with beeswax.
No siren song encountered during our journey on our
inner river should allure or pierce our emotional boundaries. Especially if we
are sailing up-river, against the current. Some inner rivers can and do go
back.
They say he who deals in honey licks his fingers. I
wonder if on the Spice Road merchants selling pepper licked their fingers. When
our days are mellifluous and flowing with honey, we may be tempted to lick our
fingers. But few of us embark upon that journey without the Spice Road
merchants’ peppers.
Did Shakespeare in Sonnet 128 dreamed of kissing the
hands of a woman playing music while his deaf ears heard the melody, as he
wrote:
“Nimble
leap
To
kiss the inward of thy hand”?
Yet, not all rivers are for a journey. Some need to
be just crossed; others to walk their banks. We are often curious about what
hides on the other side of the river. That crossing is for those who have never
seen an ocean before. The flux and flow they know is about the moment, what
befalls upon our eyes and ears.
An African proverb reminds us of the humility necessary while we are safely on the banks of rivers going to sea, or inner rivers going upstream, against the current.
“Those who have not crossed the river should
not laugh at those who are drowning”
... Rivers may or cannot go back. But it feels like they do when sailors turn the bow and push upstream.
September 19, 2026
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2026
Photo taken with a Soviet Salyut-C medium format
camera and Zodiak 8B 30mm f3.5 lens made in Ukraine.
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