Registration for our January 8-13, 2024 Write Together session is in full swing. I’d love to see you in this one hour, twice-daily workshop in which we all quietly write together from a guided prompt. It’s a beautiful way to usher in the new year. 

It’s all just too much sometimes, this daily horror show of news. Hard to hang on to what’s left of sanity. This is when I go back in time, in my mind, to my gentle, soft spoken grandfather, who left school after the eighth grade to farm but who carried so much memorized poetry in his mind and heart. I don’t know if Where Go the Boats is one he used to recite to me, but it could have been.

Where Go the Boats, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Dark brown is the river,
golden is the sand.
It flows along for ever,
with trees on either hand.

Green leaves a-floating,
castles of the foam,
boats of mine a-boating—
where will all come home?

On goes the river
and out past the mill,
away down the valley,
a way down the hill.

Away down the river,
a hundred miles or more,
other little children
shall bring my boats ashore.

Click here for more information about Robert Louis Stevenson. 
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My podcast: Words by Winter