23 November 2025

By Philip Kuepper

‘We row south,
from Finland,
from Sweden, from the fjords.
We row south
to Denmark, out of the north,
unto the Netherlands, where we lay up
our oars. It has been a good row,
sun all the way,
on our backs and shoulders.
We are turned bronze.
We are become the bronzed race,
we rowers in and of the sun.
We row the world
to mingle and learn.
We gold ourselves into the batter at hand.
We are of the bread being
kneaded and shaped.
We are of the bread being
loafed and baked.
Sliced, toasted, we become
buttery with the world’s ways.
We row the ways,
the ways there are to be rowed.
They are threads, the ways,
threads to the watery
carpet we weave,
There are the Amstel, the Seine,
the Ebro, the Guadalquivir,
the Douro, the Niger,
the Danube, the Rhine,
the Vistula, the Po. There is the Reuss.
And these are but a few of the ways.
We have yet to row
the Mekong, the Mississippi,
the Missouri, the Columbia,
the Amazon, ways with which
to thread the needles of our oars,
and all, all
the innumerable other ways
to weave whole the watery known
carpet for the torn
floor of our nerve-wracked world.’

(12 November 2025)