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& their skin-thin silt the Scheldt ground down
from rocks, slopes & swamps — a rainy-day-gray mud,
that satin muck that slips through fingers &
escapes toward the insatiable North Sea.
Neptune was born there a farmer told me,
in that estuary where the sky is so low,
you can sip it from your lips.
No horizon, not a farm or field or path — only
unbound marshes moored under the constant
giggle of cloud-ghosting gulls.
It’s this sludge, marsh-soaked, that the winds
whistle to & wrinkle — braiding pickleweed
& widgeon grass — where cat-sized muskrats shriek
& pull bitterns down into the sludge by the feet.
Everything there is sopped with everything:
light with silt, silt with clouds, clouds with rain
& sloughs with rot & slime.
But in the Spring, when griseous clouds swell
high in the air, sun-shafts dive — sudden & brilliant —
deep into the gulleys’ throats, & if you wait long enough,
right there: out of the vaguely swaying sedge,
you’ll hear it: the soar of the marsh warbler’s song —
& it’s then that you’ll press both hands to your heart.
Both hands to your heart.
—
(The Schorren are large sweet and salt water marshes at the estuary of the Scheldt River in Antwerp, Belgium)
Copyright 2019 Laure-Anne Bosselaar. First published in ORION — Nov-Dec 2016. Included in Vox Populi with permission.
I love the use of language in this poem—meticulous and magical.
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I agree. No one crafts a line as well as Laure-Anne.
Michael Simms https://www.michaelsimms.info
Author of Nightjar Author of American Ash Founder of Autumn House Press Editor of Vox Populi
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