The River

In one day the Amazon discharges into the Atlantic the equivalent of New York City's water supply for nine years.

-New York Times

Just because I was born
precisely here or there,
in some cold city or other,
don't think I don't remember
how I came along like a grain
carried by the flood

on one of the weedy threads that pour
toward a muddy lightning,
surging east, past
monkeys and parrots, past
trees with their branches in the clouds, until
I was spilled forth

and slept under the blue lung
of the Caribbean.

Nobody
told me this. But little by little
the smell of mud and leaves returned to me,
and in dreams I began to turn,
to sense the current.

Do dreams lie? Once I was a fish
crying for my sisters in the sprawling
crossroads of the delta.
Once among the reeds I found
a boat, as thin and lonely
as a young tree. Nearby
the forest sizzled with the afternoon rain.

Home, I said
In every language there is a word for it.
In the body itself, climbing
those walls of white thunder, past those green
temples, there is also
a word for it.
I said, home.

-Mary Oliver