Old gypsy lady Susquehanna, three hundred million years and counting

Older than that holy Nile or Ganges, earth’s oldest water ever spilling

Daughter to the clouds and rainbows, sister to aged Allegheny mountains

Great artery of this America, fountain to a well of years so near to filling

Time must circle back on itself, though first it seems straight like gravity

In such wise the gypsy speaks deceitful tales when in youth she murmurs

Whispering to the rocks of what will come as fate to every camp and city

Rank histories of war upon its banks, floods of old, unrepented murders,

Knowing what all knowing is, but then at last that viscid surface quickens

Casting off its sullen glaze of lies, deep pendulum of ancient slaughter,

Her measure all at once plunges swifter to the sea, the dull motion lightens

A dead history of meandering turns and shifts to this rush of living water

At Columbia, the river town where the gypsy finds her soul and freedom

Where Wright built his cabin and plied his ferry, he was a gospel pacifist

The Quaker sought a different kind of world, an altogether novel idiom,

Grace not guns, his kind of tongue, a destiny of peace here made manifest

Unseen world’s discovery, the dove’s deep forgiving arc circling to descent

At last, by the side of a dazzled flood in this late age’s lingering afternoon

You feel the river urging, blocked and held but pressing on, never quenched

And yet all made new in a continent sore abused will never come too soon

The Susquehannock lived here and if Iroquois, beaver wars, and flintlocks

Did not finish them smallpox and Sunday Paxton boys surely killed them all

Meanwhile rafts laden with flour and coal flowed downstream to the docks

And lumber piled thick as grass on Front Street, a nation’s baptized capital

For the newly rich, but each the fractious prism of the other, this American

Dream, with other chattels too, African slaves and their traumatized exodus

North, crossing here to yet longer exile, a ghetto space amidst Samaritans

While railroads hammered out the rhythm, the sound of industry, iron angelus

Chorded into music by metal strung guitars, ragtime, jazz, blues, rap and rock

Soul memory of exiles, easing pain where it’s impossible to know the river-bed

Until at last water itself sounds alarm, altering tempo to reveal history’s shock

Against life itself, a Susquehanna effect, changing misery for light that’s shed

Everywhere her voice is raised to tell and any man or woman hears her meaning

This song, they feel it, swelling over every hill and scale, this altered frequency

Incense and lavender, heather and thyme, fields of gold and the last harvest season

O portal of the Jordan, where murder is no more, and all is but grain and mercy

Come, come all, to this unknown west, this undiscovered south, where the leaves

Heal each broken skin of every shade, on trees beside a river flowing from a throne

Abyss of love disappearing and resurfacing ever the same, so no creature grieves

For dead oceans of hatred without cease, there is just the swirl of love to atone

Throw wide the gates to the river city, this final Columbia of all our dreams and history

The water seethes with light, angels and martyrs dance forever among its fiery filaments

Shrapnel metamorphic to compassion, its bitter molecules recoded into tender mystery

Transformation is the face of truth, not two-faced being and a dumb parade of elements

Start in the middle always, nel mezzo del cammin, the thick of life’s most urgent story

Here, here with this, this flowing river, and all its quick, bright, swift, and sudden glory