Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Ode to the Schorren

& 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)

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Copyright 2019 Laure-Anne Bosselaar. First published in ORION —  Nov-Dec 2016. Included in Vox Populi with permission.