Prophecy of a Scorned River
New York, NY
2025, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
The river does not relent.
She is older than your trespasses
and remembers the time before your kind pillaged her youth.
The maiden of moss and milkweed,
she remembers the minnows tickling her shores
while the frogs sang liturgy from the chapels of her reeds.
She once adored the beavers who built marvels out of birch trees.
She once kissed the slender ankles of deer
and bathed the newborn sun in the basin of her open palms.
But that was before.
Before she took back highways and drowned our rooftops,
before she ferried us like paper boats and laughed
the brittle laugh of a woman scorned.
Now, she drags the carcasses of summers too long, too bright, too blistered
with hubris to be anything but unholy.
We say she is mad.
Deem her the whore of the floodplain.
We blame her moon for tugging too hard,
berate her rain for coming on too strong.
Never do we taste the bitter fruit of the Eden we razed.
Never do we mourn what we murdered.
Never do we bear any culpability for the cult of our creation—
not for the dams and their dredging,
not for the chemicals that gave our repugnant river that oil-slick shimmer,
not for the blistering bogs we had the nerve to call beautiful.
But she knows.
She knows her beauty is fading fast.
I have seen it in the way she spits back the bones of bridges,
in the way she cradles dead fish in eddies fallen still.
I have seen the reckoning to come.
She’ll remember how we feed her the mercury of our monstrous mouths,
how we wring our wretched into her veins,
how we poison her with our runoff and ruin,
how we take and take and take until she forgets what it means to give.
She sings lullabies to the drowned things as if she, not us, carried them in her womb.
And still, we pave her banks,
choke her tributaries with our plastic prayers.
We make excuses.
We say it was a bad year.
We say it was an anomaly.
We say the sea didn’t mean to flow that far inland.
We blame the weather as if it were wild without wound or fair warning.
But I have watched glaciers crumble like sand,
I’ve heard the ghost-cries of butterflies and saber-toothed cats.
I’ve felt her belly bloat and birth the dead.
I know that while we drink in artificial air,
the river coughs black into the sky.
We scroll past her obituary
as if it were the daily weather report.
We teach our children to fear her turning tides
without explaining why they are rising.
For years, she begged us to listen to her pleas.
But we wanted more.
More malls, more meat, more miles per gallon.
We wanted oranges in January
and strawberries in the snow.
We wanted a world that bowed to us.
And maybe, if she groveled nicely enough,
if she played the part of the pretty puddle,
we’d let her have her day every April 22nd,
slap a leaf on a tote bag,
buy a reusable straw,
and pat ourselves on the back.
But the river is the baptism we never earned.
She is the crimson of the blood on your hands.
She is the thunderous prophecy,
the mother in perpetual mourning.
She is the rising tides,
the push and pull.
The day of judgement is coming.
And the river ripples, and runs, and babbles, and breaks,
but the one thing she will never, ever do
is forget.
Reflection
Reflection
Prophecy of a Scorned River was a creative response to my anger at climate apathy, corporate greenwashing, and the way we romanticize nature while destroying it. I was inspired by the image of the river as a scorned, sentient force that is older than us, wiser than us, and after far too long, done forgiving us. I imagined her as both prophet and mother, lover and executioner. Much of the imagery came to me during long walks along the Hudson River, where I’d notice the rubbish slapping against the rocks in the river or plastic tangled in tree roots, but still see birds nesting and grass growing. That tension between beauty and ruin definitely informed my voice as a writer for change. Through this piece, I’ve realized that our connection to nature is also about how we take responsibility for it. Nature is not separate from us. The destruction we inflict on it is a reflection of what we’ve become. My message to viewers is this: the Earth remembers. And if we continue to treat her wounds like anomalies, it will be us who pays the ultimate price.