poeticverse
River Man
River Man
by Hannah Hamilton
Rivers can be metaphors for many things. Metaphors for life, for its twists and turns, for the suredness of its path, for our uncertainty of what lies ahead. For times of peace in deep, calm waters, for times of struggle in the turbulence of the rapids, for times of submergence when hard bedrock yields to soft sand, creating hidden whirlpools and turnholes that threaten to suck us under their untroubled surface. Metaphors for the flow of time that’s constant in its pace but relative in our experience of it: going fast when we’re paddling frantic up stream, and slow, when we’re floating down, on our backs, gazing up at the clouds, letting the current do with us what it will. And metaphors for memories. That ethereal lifeblood that courses through our lives just like a river, connecting the babbling brook to the broad estuary, giving us a place, a direction, a stage, a reflection.
Rivers flow in all of us, and us in them, and in the sublimeness of their presence we find ours.
In his own way, my father taught me this. Not in words, they were not his strong point: as a peasant child in 1930s rural Ireland, he emerged illiterate and innumerate from two years of schooling, an experience that’s greatest impact was felt on the temples of his head, the lobes of his ears and the palms of his hands. He recalls being beaten by the teacher for ‘being thick’, so he wouldn’t go to school, and instead opted to be beaten at home by his father for truancy. School registers from the time record one of two excuses: ‘Wet day no clothes’ or, more frequently, ‘Gone fishing’.
What I learned from him came in more subtle ways than that of lecture, both in retrospect and in riddle, that required a certain amount of water to pass between the arches of my bridge to be understood. But now, I understand.
Because that scrawny malnourished child with no shoes and no electricity, that picked stones out of pratie (potato) fields for pennies and knew the fear of God like the back of his hand instilled in his child, a child of 1980s relative affluence with a full belly and nothing for wants, a sense of what it is to know oneself through nature, to find your place in this world, and in that place be free. His lesson was his life, and his classroom his river.
River Man
River Man
by Hannah Hamilton
Rivers can be metaphors for many things. Metaphors for life, for its twists and turns, for the suredness of its path, for our uncertainty of what lies ahead. For times of peace in deep, calm waters, for times of struggle in the turbulence of the rapids, for times of submergence when hard bedrock yields to soft sand, creating hidden whirlpools and turnholes that threaten to suck us under their untroubled surface. Metaphors for the flow of time that’s constant in its pace but relative in our experience of it: going fast when we’re paddling frantic up stream, and slow, when we’re floating down, on our backs, gazing up at the clouds, letting the current do with us what it will. And metaphors for memories. That ethereal lifeblood that courses through our lives just like a river, connecting the babbling brook to the broad estuary, giving us a place, a direction, a stage, a reflection.
Rivers flow in all of us, and us in them, and in the sublimeness of their presence we find ours.
In his own way, my father taught me this. Not in words, they were not his strong point: as a peasant child in 1930s rural Ireland, he emerged illiterate and innumerate from two years of schooling, an experience that’s greatest impact was felt on the temples of his head, the lobes of his ears and the palms of his hands. He recalls being beaten by the teacher for ‘being thick’, so he wouldn’t go to school, and instead opted to be beaten at home by his father for truancy. School registers from the time record one of two excuses: ‘Wet day no clothes’ or, more frequently, ‘Gone fishing’.
What I learned from him came in more subtle ways than that of lecture, both in retrospect and in riddle, that required a certain amount of water to pass between the arches of my bridge to be understood. But now, I understand.
Because that scrawny malnourished child with no shoes and no electricity, that picked stones out of pratie (potato) fields for pennies and knew the fear of God like the back of his hand instilled in his child, a child of 1980s relative affluence with a full belly and nothing for wants, a sense of what it is to know oneself through nature, to find your place in this world, and in that place be free. His lesson was his life, and his classroom his river.