I don’t know, but I sit myself down next to one and ask.

And then I listen.

And in the quiet, the water making almost no sound that I can detect,
Stream answers:

We remember everything. As do you.
Especially on the anniversary of that day, that year,
when so much was lost, when it felt to you like
the beginning of the end.

It is not the end. It was never the end.
We keep flowing, even when it seems that we are dry,
when you can see nothing but river rock,
so many stones that add up to those lost.

You don’t have to know them, any of them, to feel their passing.

They have whooshed by you on the way out of their bodies
into the stream—
which is us, which is you, which is everything.

Take heart, as you do every day, in the flow,
in the coming and going, even in the leaves,

which still look so green, which are beginning
to silently turn,
to begin the fall.

—

9/11/26
Rosh Hashanah