Tuesday Poem, LITTLE MIRACLE IN LAKELAND, Melissa Green

LITTLE MIRACLE IN LAKELAND

Clouds and mist enshroud Lake Morton,

shawling cypresses knee-deep in shallows,

leaving a silver beaded net in the palm trees' hair.

We sit on a dewy bench, my sister and I,

immobilized by five excitable ibis

wading near us. A Little Blue Heron

hunches and shakes itself.

A lone pelican stares and looks away.

Black and white Muscovy ducks are laughing,

wattle-red wens mottling their faces.

A homely wood stork with its punk cut

can't look at us at all. A Great White Heron

tweezes a spiny fish, holds it, snaps

its pincer beak, holds it, snaps it

to a final soft swallow. Cruciform,

an anhinga stands on a rock to dry its wings.

Out on the water, two white swans gossip

and a black swan hurries its cygnets to school.

We barely breathe. After twenty-five years,

we sit calmly, without guilt or envy or injury.

Suddenly from the First United Methodist Church

behind us, a joyous carillon begins. The larger birds

hunker awkwardly and fly out of the left-hand frame.

The surface of the lake is all commotion and bright wings:

the smaller startled birds are paddling into a flotilla

led by the swans, and even the water is coming in

in rhyming pinions. The ducks are bobbing their rumps

in time to the bells, and ruffling wings keep landing,

swimming into place, filling the water in a vee formation,

and migrating birds keep swimming for the other shore

as though they'd been called.

                                  I wondered then which

was  more astonishing -- the way the clouds rolled up

the scrim of mist from the proscenium and the birds

pulled down the sun, uncurling to the rhythm of the bells

its brightening watered silk behind them -- or my sister and I,

our holding hands, as though we'd always done it.

by Melissa Green

I'm sorry that I was so slow in responding to Mary McCallum's wonderful request for a poem from Melissa Green. Our time differences were about half an hour off....but here, at least, is the poem.........from her book, Daphne in Mourning, soon to be published by the Pen & Anvil Press. 

Her first book of poems, The Squanicook Eclogues, won the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America 1989 and the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Recently it was reissued by the Pen & Anvil Press. A second book of poems, Fifty-Two, was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2007. Color is the Suffering of Light: A Memoir was published by W.W. Norton & Co, 1995.

(I'm glad to have had a chance to present this particular poem about reconciliation (and perhaps forgiveness.) For me, typing it was a way of moving more deeply into the images, a privilege for me that unfortunately offers the chance that I haven't caught all my inevitable mistakes. They are mine, not Melissa Green's.)