‘The River Wye’ and Other Poetry by Mike Ruskovich

The River Wye

Your stroll beside the stream has stayed with me,
Has left me in my loneliness with strength
Enough to face the world, to somehow see
Within its depth and width and wandering length
The Truth that Keats and Coleridge saw with eyes
Romantic yet as real as river stones
That roll the water, washing clean the lies
That cling like greed to human flesh and bones.
Your words, worth all the days and nights I spend
In contemplation seeking my own worth,
Are currents catching me each time I bend
My back to labor, sifting through the Earth
You sorted for me walking by the Wye,
In lines admiring how instead of why.

The Greatest Wall of China

When commerce comes before the human soul,
And speech is caged and liberty’s confined,
While privacy’s imprisoned by a goal
That values money more than any mind
Where freedom is the currency of choice,
Then more is ruined than the land and air—
Pollution stains the hopeful heart and voice
That speaks against oppression everywhere;
It stains the fabric stitched by brotherhood
And builds the kind of thick restrictive wall
That harbors hate, restraining all the good
We’d have to share if only walls could fall.
When politics make bricks of helping hands,
The worst and highest wall of all still stands.

Nuclear Thinking

Explain this lie if you can
To Ukraine and to Japan
How “safe” and “cheap” are terms that fit
Between the gap when atoms split,
The long-term wasteland left behind
By the plans of a short-term mind,
The daft irradiated leap
That’s in fact neither safe nor cheap.

Interpretation

One night I and a thinking friend
Walked out to the beach’s end.
The moonlit shore on which we walked
Inspired us as we talked,
Expressing our philosophies
About mountains, moons, and seas.
We were not so different in our views,
But it’s human nature to refuse
To accept an object that we see
As being what another claims it to be.
So the mountain remained a mountain still,
Though he insisted it was a hill.
And still the waves were constant in motion
As I argued sea and he argued ocean.
So we walked back resolved to naught,
Still thinking but with no change of thought.
He never listened but his verse flowed fine,
And while he spoke his, I heard mine.

Mike Ruskovich lives in Grangeville, Idaho. He taught high school English for thirty-six years. He and his wife have four children.

Featured Image: “The River Wye at Tintern Abbey,” 1805, by Philip James de Loutherbourg.