“You’re only given one little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.”
(Robin Williams, quoted by Mitch Teemley)
The Guadalupe reaches for the ocean.
The Pedernales reaches for the ocean.
The Rio Grande reaches for the ocean.
The Colorado reaches for the ocean.
The San Jacinto reaches for the ocean.
The Brazos doesn’t reaches for the ocean.
The Devils doesn’t reaches for the ocean.
The Pecos doesn’t reaches for the ocean.
The Neches doesn’t reaches for the ocean.
The Sulphur doesn’t reaches for the ocean.
The Cypress doesn’t reaches for the ocean.
The Red, the Sabine,
The Nueces, the Lavaca, the Trinity,
The Canadian, the San Antonio
Doesn’t reaches for the ocean.
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
Una chispa de locura . Vivir sin ella sería muy aburrido.
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Espero que justifique soltar un disparate de vez en cuando. ¿Quién sabe de dónde salga ni a que conduzca? Un alma afín reconoce que pueda ser chispa valiosa, y si no, aliviadora. 🙂
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Delightful! I love it.
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Thank you, Sue! I’m not sure where this came from. They’re all the rivers in my state. I cross a number of them regularly. I’ve no doubt a recitation of your rivers would be pure poetry.
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Yes – on a road trip recently we crossed the Murrumbidgee, Murray, Barcoo and Barwon rivers …. I need to make a longer list now!
I had no idea that you have so many rivers in your part of the world. Your poetry would make a wonderful song, or rap perhaps! cheers Sue
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Haha! River rap! A new sub-genre. Good idea, Sue. Just as I suspected, though, your river names put mine in the shade. My little effusion, besides savaging English negation, is based on syllable count in the names, and I think Australia will win this contest! In my neck of the woods it’s instructive to note the predominance of Spanish names in much of our topography. I’ve dreamed of somehow dramatizing that renaming the Gulf of Mexico is just a drop in ocean in subtracting the non-English traces, were that considered a worthy goal. You may be aware of how Mount Denali has been reversed to McKinley, and so it goes.
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It’s interesting how changing placenames has such importance – here we are changing colonial placenames back to indigenous ones. Many of the rivers in Australia seem to be named after explorers or squatters who are now being revealed as having done terrible things to indigenous groups when taking over their land. And it’s a contested issue! Perhaps you have more than one set of names to examine? Indigenous, Spanish and English? All very interesting.
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Yes, interesting, Sue. Besides Spanish and French, many of our placenames have Native American roots, though that rubric spans a wide range of peoples who were here before the Europeans arrived. Much squabbling here revolves around Civil War-era commemorative artifacts, including the names of military bases. The culture wars seem inexhaustible.
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Ah yes, even more complexity than I realised … and there’s always someone ready to drum up a culture war or two. Sue
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