Poets from both sides of the Hudson are invited to join Riverspace in celebrating the Quadricentennial of the exploration of the Hudson River. Every community, all ages, from the harbor in New York City to the Hudson's source at Cloud-of-the-Tears will be represented on the Riverspace poetry page.

Any style is welcome as long as the central theme of the poem is the Hudson River. Do you have a sonnet about the Half Moon, Henry Hudson's ship? How about a sestina or free verse about the people who have fished the river, either the Lenape or more recent anglers?

Or couplets, rhyming or not, about a specific river village?

Send your poems about the Hudson to readings@riverspace.org or mail to: River Poems, Riverspace, 119 Main Street, Nyack, NY 10960. Poetry will be posted on the Riverspace website and can be read by clicking on poetry. Poems will not be returned so don't send your only copy. Please be sure to include your name and town so attribution can be made.

Thanks to Noel Smith, Meredith Trede, Robert Milby and Terri Kayden for joining "the community of readers and writers" and sharing their river poems.

rowing a skiff into a crimson
stripe sizzling across the Hudson.
He vanished in blazes,
rowed out the other side,
never knew it.

I would like to think
that he came out with only his core,
the crimson band having seared off
deposits of sorrow and dumb weight
rusted onto his ribs.

I would like to think
that he pulled his skiff ashore
while the hermit thrush sang
and, never having heard it before,
lay down and listened until dark.

- Noel Smith
Pomona, NY

Below, beyond tracks of suburban train line
whitecaps foam against wind and turning tide,
surging memory of a city river before my time,
crowds of family reverie told to be retold:
stationmaster aunt's house at Inwood-on-Hudson
taken down for a highway right-of-way;

swim parties buoying my young parents all the way
to marriage; Model T's and roadsters backed up in a line
on Dyckman to Broadway to ferry the unbridged Hudson;
winters so cold deep-footed ice submerged the tide
rolling a solid road from bank to bank, Aunt Lou told
how she walked over to the Jersey side one time

as cars drove by. So we go winding back through time,
the cut and crush of the last glacier melting away
to the ocean's incoming rush, a drowned river's untold
coursing and deepening beneath receding sea line
leaving streams, rapids, waterfalls to swell the tide-
surging race whose early waters, not yet named Hudson,

rise in Adirondack heights (the end of what Henry Hudson
sought as gateway to the Indies) to feed in due time
from Lake Tear-in-the-Clouds down to a tide
pool rich in twenty foot sturgeon, roe-filled shad, away
to oyster and terrapin in New York Bay, as a line
of Europeans chart, name, claim and we're told

purchased and parceled fair and square. Family, little told:
colonial farm on Staten Island; immigrants' bleak Hudson
vistas from Hell's Kitchen; extend the genetic line
to an exiled German soon Civil War Captain; swift time
to a grandson's patrol keeping the Great War's Huns away
from the climax forest where Spuyten Duyvil's hunger at tide

turn feeds from eddies of conjoined waters---Harlem tide
moving past riprap, rotted pilings; where nothing foretold
a crazed-mean Sioux painter and his Irish bride's way
into shabby gentility, overlooked, overlooking the Hudson;
but here comes the breath-stealing panic of passing time
shadowing clouds tailing upriver in a tattered line

leading the way back to my window on the Hudson,
riverskin slick at slack tide, still currents of more to be told
out of my time, beyond the ebb and flow of my line.

- Meredith Trede
Sleepy Hollow, NY

The river opens up to me
And all of those who are here to see.

The shimmer, the shine.

The wind caresses my body
Sending a chill along my spine.

She calls out to me to sit upon her, caress me, ride me, watch me
All of you who come out to see.

The moisture hits my soul deep inside.
My lips tingle from the taste of your salts.

Absorbing the wetness, I sit and pulsate.

- Terri Kayden
Nyack, NY

Morning Hudson River has ice on its face;
Ice on its skin in late January.
Ghosts fly low to kiss ice bouquets in its powerful arms, jeweled cloak;
Hair rivulets and tribulations of Winter blue.

I shout crow poetry from a sleep-deprived bridge in auto thunder,
Thinking of Parisi and his darkened theatre.
Considering restraint before the sunrise,
Yet remembering the brevity of human existence
And yearning for the warm freedom of my beautiful lover's embrace.
She shall leave and return, leave and return--a river of emotional
Power, a capsized boat carried far away.
Yet in this river, there is magic.
Logs return, gulls return, eagles introspect introverted hawks.
Currents of human struggle.

We are ensnared in the satraps of poisoned modernity.
We beat conundrums of confusion and confession.
And the river is a witness to our fervor; a mirror to our passion,
A quiet repository of grief, of joy, of mystery, and constancy.

And will you drag the psychic river of your thoughts--turbulent flow
Of dream fragments or simply drive over the bridge, never pausing,
Repeating the turgid commute into older age when blood cools
And fears are kept like animal husbandry or pets nestled by the hearth?

I do not wish to marry Lethe or the foggy regrets of my past.
But I shall follow ghosts, curiously, until they no longer have ice on their faces.

- Robert Milby
Florida, NY