I wonder how the green frog feels
at the end of winter,
buried in mud under a waterbody,
body diffused with glucose
so that crystals cannot form
to pierce a heart or lung;
waiting as the equinox is crossed, the sun
thinning the ice until
a shaft of warmth finds the
mottled dark skin.
How must it feel to come from frozen,
to stir not from sleep but from torpor,
thawing,
the last memory of failing light,
of sinking into dormancy with the
faith that a shaft of light
will find it, that the time will come again
for singing, for embracing in the fresh vernal
ponds, for coupling.
I stretch in the sunlight
of an early spring morning,
skin reddening after months of cover,
imagining the longer days and how
they might be filled.
I think I hear the early song
of a green frog in the woods.
Poem by Patricia Thrushart.
Poet and writer Patricia Thrushart has published three books, Little Girl Against The Wall, Yin and Yang, and Sanctity: Poems from Northern Appalachia. Her work appears regularly in The Watershed Journal, a regional literary magazine of Northwestern Pennsylvania, and on the websites Dark Horse Appalachia and North/South Appalachia. Her poems have been published in Tiny Seed, Clarion University’s Tobeco, The Avocet, Still Point Arts Quarterly, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, The Indiana Gazette, Feminine Collective, Curating Alexandria, High Shelf Press, The Northern Appalachia Review and The Pennsylvania Poetry Society’s Magazine PENNESSENCE. Her narrative nonfiction book, Cursed: The Story of Marion Alsobrook Stahlman, will be published in October, 2021, by Adelaide Books of New York. www.patriciathrushart.com.