Delaware

Like a woman

Sometimes fickle

Always changing

Both delicate and strong

Giving life through the decades

Warm in summer

Bugs fish wood green and lush

Cold in winter

Ice snow wind and shimmering shine

Always alive

Always reborn

My heart will always long for you

Seeking to be reborn

In places of no comfort

Dry foam sterile and plastic

Thinking back to the sand silt and dirt

Muck and wet rotting leaves and horseflies

Smell of shad on your shores

Desperate to spawn

And their stink

Filling the air, life and death inhaled

In one breathe

Sight of eels in the water looking like

Slippery sliding sly snakes of the depths

You have had names before that which

We call you

You shall have more names still

The name we hold in our hearts for you

Will always be the same

No words are needed for it

For just as we need not articulate that

Which our hearts know our mothers to be

Always what you are

Life giver life taker

Warmest and most welcoming

Coldest and most foreboding

Never ever changing

Yet current always raging

Mother River

Gene G. McLaughlin 2015