It began long before the words.
Before the stones were shaped or lifted.
Before the first fire cracked against the chill of this island.
The river moved then as it does now.
Slow, with weight.
A creature without need.
The Britons came with paint on their skin,
hunters who watched it with reverence and fear.
They thought it sacred.
They gave it names, none of which it kept.
It gave them fish, and swallowed their children.
They prayed.
The river did not answer.
The Romans built walls.
They called the place Londinium,
hammered the soil, drove posts into mud.
They crossed it with stone and timber,
made order of what could not be ordered.
The river, gray and full of silt,
rose and fell with no regard.
It saw their legions leave.
It forgot them in a day.
The Saxons came in the quiet that followed.
They built closer to the banks,
thinking the river a friend.
But in time it pulled homes into itself,
rotted wood, erased names.
It taught no lessons.
They learned only what time did not hide.
Then came the longships.
Men with axes and gods born in frost.
The Thames opened to them like a wound.
They rowed up with fire in their wake,
and the river was calm.
London burned,
its people screamed,
the water did not boil.
The Normans stood on the ash,
made laws and castles.
They watched the tide like it was a clock,
but it told no time they could understand.
It rose as it always had,
drowning rats and children,
lifting the dead against the moorings.
Centuries moved like fog.
Plague.
Fire.
Kings.
Steam.
Steel.
Bridges like ribs sewn across the water’s width.
Ships became smoke and iron,
men became noise and need.
Still, the river moved.
In war, bombs fell into its mouth.
Men built barricades and prayed for fog.
The Thames swallowed the light and carried away pieces of London.
It did not fight, did not break.
It watched.
Now the city stands high,
of glass and wire,
its people fast,
its pulse unsteady.
The river coils beneath it,
mud-thick, patient.
It carries their waste, their bones,
their bright illusions.
Tourists lean over its edge.
They take pictures of what they cannot keep.
The river glints.
Not in greeting, not in warning.
Just the sun on water.
They say the Thames remembers.
But it does not.
It does not mourn,
does not celebrate.
It has moved through the age of wolves and kings,
through empires and silence,
through fire and empire and fog.
It will move still,
when the city falls again,
when the lights go out,
when only the gulls remain.
The Thames does not care.
It only goes on.
Broken Author 