697 B
697 B
The River Song
A traditional verse, collected in the highlands.
The river runs clean where the tall pines drink,
and the cold water sings on the stone;
I filled my cup at the mountain's brink
and boiled the night down to the bone.
Three days of rain and the fords ran high,
the crossing lost to the flood —
we watched the clean water hurrying by
and tasted the silt and the mud.
They sang this at the spring gathering, when the snowmelt came down and the lower fields flooded. The verse is older than the settlement itself, and nobody remembers who wrote it. It is about patience, and about the distance between water you can see and water you can drink.