A few weeks ago
while visiting a daughter in Montana,
I stood at the headwaters of the Missouri River
tucked away in a wide mountain valley.
We had hiked for an hour or so
through scrubland with the smell of sage in the air
to view the gathering of rivers
where Lewis & Clarke had camped
some two hundred years earlier.
A few weeks later
I find myself downstream in Memphis,
wondering if the brown waters
that I view from my hotel window
are the same that I saw
flowing clear over river rocks out west.
I think about being taken up into the sky,
coming back down as rain on the plains,
again being caught up in the great river basin.
Or maybe I flow and wind my way
along thousand mile stretches of river banks,
sightseeing, careless with no mind of my own,
moving with all that is around me
under the great big sky.
A Thread You Follow 