The Coxs River In New South Wales Australia Flows In Quiet Valley Places And Holds Historic Relevance To The Early Settlement Of The Country. Poem by Reginald Reid

Coxs River

I can hear the water running over rocks and logs and spills
Assembling a torrent that has trickled from the hills
It's natures life blood flowing as it nurtures all its world around
Each of the very smallest to the tallest that abound.

The journey that this water takes leads through so many needy places
The wooded banks and flatlands with their grassland open spaces
Sustaining all God's creatures in many varied ways
This precious source of water flowing through the hours of night and day.

Have you seen this great orator of babble and of song
This welcomer of travelers as they make their way along
This one who sanctifies all manner of the rising and of fall
In plenty and in drought time as the sanctuary for all.

In moments rested as a pondlike pool the waters spin and swirl
And then across the rocks the journey there unfurls
Where bubbles form then gurgling burst with reflected rainbow glow
As floating rafts and rafters sit up on top the flow
Crazily ambivalent on which way they ought to go

And yet the mystery sustains in the way her mood can change
From beguiling feminine to boisterous male in response
to falling rains
That make the sanctuary of bird homes up higher in the trees
Imitate the peace and quiet of dip and drink in sunlit zephyr breeze.

In time she may come and go as pleases her, the way that women do
And others, they will come and go, perhaps including you
So shall the rocks wear down with time and water's flow
But always lives the memory that she has carved and where the waters go.