This pewter remnant within a golden prairie,
this glacial legacy, this child of primeval rivers,
now become the River of Man, faithful
and fecund servant of the Illinois
who named it and of the voyageurs who claimed it
as their own.
Flowing from the Kankakee
and the Des Plaines, cutting sandstone rock
at Utica, inspiring myths and vistas, widening
into the Peoria, skirting Spunky Bottoms,
this River, itself replenished by prairie waters —
the Fox, the Vermilion, the Mackinaw, the Sangamon, the Spoon —
embraced by its ancient father, the Mississippi,
this River carries with it into the sea the memory
of sycamore, of cottonwood, and of oak savannahs,
and of the false aster fragile upon its banks,
and of the great blue heron, the snowy egret,
and of the eagle, and of the cormorant, the duck, the tern,
and the evanescent warbler marking the spring and fall,
and of the mussel, the muskrat, the beaver, the otter,
and of the turtle, and the sturgeon , patriarch of the life it harbors.
And the current of the River of Man carries the memory
of the lights of cities, barges, long-legged houses
reflecting from waters now channelized, diverted, bridged,
leveed, dammed, made useful for transportation,
for industrialization, for agriculture, for play,
for the sport of man and for the waste which man engenders,
the sediment, the silt, and life-dissolving solvents,
the lessons of the future of man upon its banks,
and the River flows into the sea, past
cities, oaks, and prairies and the most fragile of flowers.
