Bendemeer’s Stream (early 1800s)
Thomas Moore
There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s stream,
And the nightingale sings round it all the day long;
In the time of my childhood ’twas like a sweet dream
To sit in the roses and hear the bird’s song.
That bower and its music I never forget,
But oft, when alone in the bloom of the year,
I think, “Is the nightingale singing there yet?
Are the roses still bright by the calm Bendemeer?”
No—the roses soon wither’d that hung o’er the wave,
But some blossoms were gather’d, while freshly they shone;
And a dew was distilled from their flowers, that gave
All the fragrance of summer when summer was gone.
Thus memory draws from delight, ere it dies,
An essence that breathes of it many a year;
Thus bright to my soul, as ’twas then to my eyes,
Is that bower on the banks of the calm Bendemeer.
My River runs to Thee (c. 1860) (alias The Outlet)
Emily Dickinson
My river runs to thee—
Blue sea, wilt welcome me?
My river waits reply.
Oh sea, look graciously!
I’ll fetch thee brooks
From spotted nooks—
Say, sea,
Take me!
To the River (1845)
Edgar Allan Poe
Fair river! in thy bright, clear flow
Of crystal, wandering water,
Thou art an emblem of the glow Of beauty—the unhidden heart—
The playful maziness of art
In old Alberto’s daughter;
But when within thy wave she looks—
Which glistens then, and trembles—
Why, then, the prettiest of brooks
Her worshipper resembles;
For in my heart, as in thy stream,
Her image deeply lies—
The heart which trembles at the beam Of her soul-searching eyes.
On the River (1888)
Paul Laurence Dunbar
The sun is low,
The waters flow,
My boat is dancing to and fro.
The eve is still,
Yet from the hill
The killdeer echoes loud and shrill.
The paddles plash,
The wavelets dash,
We see the summer lightning flash;
While now and then,
In marsh and fen
Too muddy for the feet of men,
Where neither bird
Nor beast has stirred,
The spotted bullfrog’s croak is heard.
The wind is high,
The grasses sigh,
The sluggish stream goes sobbing by.
And far away
The dying day
Has cast its last effulgent ray;
While on the land
The shadows stand
Proclaiming that the eve’s at hand.
Calliope
Catharine Savage Brosman
I’m sitting here at Algiers Point,* by a rough bend
in the Mississippi River, just across
from the east bank, on a street called Delaronde,
which had its ferry, in times past, to Rue St. Louis
in the Vieux Carré. My friend Lois has invited me
to spend an afternoon with her; again
as in times past, why not on the porch? Today’s
a splendid specimen of March, sporting azaleas
in full bloom beside her glossy-leafed magnolia,
full of presence, and a venerable crepe myrtle,
tall, though twisted, reaching for blue sky.
Oh, Lois, we were young, or younger,
once!—like that crepe myrtle, showing its age,
yet budding out for six months more
of purple. From both sides, the river trims us.
Though most shops and houses of Algiers were ruined
in the great fire of 1895, tradition lives here still
as the pure New Orleans of the years just after:
double shotguns, handsome Greek Revivals
with side galleries, and cottages—You painted,
and I wrote, remember? And we both
loved beauty and our city, as we measured happiness
by what had been so difficult before,
but had been eased. The currents at the Point
are deep and hazardous, first pushing northward,
then forced sharply south. Now, piped
into your garden, come the notes of a calliope
leaving Toulouse Street, its familiar melodies
not yet worn out for us but melancholic in their way, sounding memories of those who lived the tunes
along the rivers of their lives, their loves
and sorrows, carried off in rushing water, silt, and foam.
* The water at Algiers Point is the deepest of the entire river.
Catharine Savage Brosman is professor emerita of French at Tulane University; cbrosman@ tulane.edu. She is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, the latest of which is Aerosols and Other Poems (2023) from Green Altar Books, an imprint of Shotwell Publishing, Brosman’s poetry has appeared regularly in AQ, along with her article “Poetry and Western Civilization” in the spring of 2023. She last appeared in these pages in the fall of 2025 with “Poetry in the Service of Truth,” a review of Kites: Poems by Jonathan Chaves.
Speculation That Builds and Shatters
—reading Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book 1929: The Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How it Shattered a Nation on the train.
They called it sin, greed,
hubris wrapped in ticker tape—
a fever of numbers
rippling through the veins of a young nation.
The roulette wheel of Wall Street spun
faster than the clocks on its towers,
until even time seemed leveraged.
But that isn’t the whole story.
Speculation did not destroy America; it breathed through it—
a restless wind,
half faith, half delusion,
that pushed the frontier forward from wilderness to skyline,
from whisper to wire.
Rails cut across the prairies
like signatures of belief.
Cables sank beneath the ocean’s skin,
carrying invisible promises.
Edison’s trembling light,
the Empire State’s defiance of gravity—
each began as a wager
on what could not yet be proven.
Speculation:
belief plus risk.
The fragile chemistry
that turns imagination into matter,
recklessness into architecture, dreams into debt.
Yet risk alone cannot build.
To speculate responsibly
is to cradle the dream in discipline,
to keep one eye on wonder
and the other on consequence.
When greed forgets proportion,
the same spark that lights the forge sets the house ablaze.
Still, the pulse endures—
that wild audacity to believe
the future might yet be made.
Each crash renews
the uneasy covenant
between courage and restraint,
between faith and the fear of loss.
Now, in the flicker
of an algorithmic dawn,
we are speculating again—
on code, on carbon, on consciousness—
still wagering belief
against the weight of gravity.
Every bubble bursts,
but belief returns,
like grass through ash—
a dangerous, dazzling inheritance:
the speculation that builds and shatters.
Jianli Yang is a research fellow at Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University and founder and president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China.