How The Tides Came To Be

 
Once a river swallowed a god. Here is how it happened. 
When gods walked along the horizon, 
one among them wanted to fly. 
She tried leaping from boulders and trees and hillocks,
but she always fell straight to earth. 
One day, desperate, she tried jumping from a cliff 
and fell into a river far below. 

What have you done?  asked the river flowing past her broken body.
I wanted to fly,  sighed the god as she died.
 
In the fall turtles and eels stripped the flesh from her bones. 
In the spring spawning salmon nibbled her eyes. 
 
When there was nothing left except the river itself, 
the river said,
Now that I have swallowed a god, I am surely become one,
and ran as fast as it could to the ocean.
 
Make way for a god, said the river.
 
But the ocean did not listen, and when the river rushed on,
the ocean swallowed it
just as surely as the river had swallowed the god.
 
Now I am a god,  thought the ocean. I shall swallow the earth.
 
And that is how waves came to be,
and why they constantly beat against the shore.

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