Echoes from the Dismal Swamp
Exiled these many years
In the land of the loud
I see Red stones roll
Down a gentle incline
Bouncing off puddles
Sitting here I see a fog float
As a silent watery cloak
And I can see what a friend once meant
When she said “The Dismal Swamp
Doesn’t reveal,
It disgorges its treasures
Moist and hideous”
It’s like some trapped tadpole
Land-locked and loveless
In its death-wriggle
Running along route 58
You can enter its darkness
Any time of day or night
This is where Nat Turner hid
From slave hunters
And talked to God
As only a child or a madman may
The dark brown water
Never tells who it holds
In its brackish embrace
There in moss and mud
I can find my Genesis, a forgiving King snake
Who says,” you can grow to enormity here”
Trumpets can blow down walls
And a new testament to living
Is gathered urgently in sticker punctured fingers
I resolve to stop reading summer morning obituaries
Instead living like the spotted salamander
Amidst herons and terrors
Focused close to the ghosted ground
On small delicacies
Because God is there too
Joshua Kight 3/12/03