There is a body
of water just down
the road.
I would call it by a more
flattering name,
wishing it weren’t
artificially made,
but the truth of it
is that it is a
retention pond.
Rains fall, gently,
or violently,
their volumes absorbed
by sand and loam,
until they can take no more
and the earth itself,
with cement tunnels
set shallowly underground,
expel what is leftover
into this waiting
vessel.
Mottled ducks
and little blue herons
make their nests along
its grassy shores.
Sand hill cranes bend
knobby knees
in loose mud in search of
succulent things.
Even tiny minnows
and tube-nosed snapping turtles
carry on each day
with their
instinctual chores
never knowing that
the very epicenter of this
small ecosystem –
perhaps an indelible dot
in a living constellation of
interconnected watering holes –
didn’t exist
only a decade before.
But I watch, admiring
the reflection of dusky
skies and
impossible cloud forms
in the surface of this water.
Admiring the way the
origins of this place –
along with my own judgements-
are ignored
because the only thing that
matters is that nature
has, in its endless flexibility
and gracious simplicity,
found in it a home.
Olivia Peters-Rivera
Olivia Peters-Rivera holds degrees in Anthropology and Literacy Studies. She directs an English as a Second Language program at a university in the swampy southeastern United States.