Vincent Spina: Mangrove

The signs are all there: Mangroves
their roots rising feet above the low tide
muck of living in calligraphies
of profound silence—fiddlers
at their fierce game of mastery
and mating— canopy above
of green survival.

You’d have to be there to decipher
the patterns, pick out the threads
of saying among the clatter
and clutter of all that demands
just to be…at any cost
and still you wouldn’t…not all,
hardly the part assigned, a part
that through its own insistence
may easily make it all wrong.

Yet somehow it begins:
that day among them all
we claim our stake in the spell
of early morning: intermission
between all the passings and passing.
Where to go now

A crow croaking in the branch
of a white skeleton that was a slash pine,
now stripped of its bark—a dove answers,
not to the crow but to the urgency
of its own need:

cacophony of helices brings us here
time and time again, satiate
empty of being

Copyright 2019 Vincent Spina

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Mangrove forest (photo: Nicerio Adventures)