When the River Still Remembers

“Every current dreams of the sea, even as frost binds its mouth.”

The river exhales fog, a low lament,

its sorrow heavy on the air:

wet stone, rotted leaf, the ghost of rain.

✦

The banks shiver, roots locked in ice,

each reed a glass tongue,

each stone a frozen breath.

Yet beneath the sheath of frost the water moves still—

a hymn unseen, a story restless.

✦

I press my palm to its skin,

the river resists, cold and thin as prophecy,

but in its tremor I feel the pulse,

the persistence of what refuses silence.

✦

The river remembers its freedom.

Even sealed, it carries the secret forward—

a promise spring will one day speak aloud.