Ciara Farris
You weave across the dew-dropped fields out back of the old intermediate school,
Harrumphing and bumping and stumbling along.
Almost accidentally, you find the trail.
Trodden by the pummeling of feet, it weaves through leaves, up and up.
Left past the wicked, twisted oak, into the circle where
A shrike of memory strikes, sharp and shining:
Scenes of decimation, dozer desecration,
flattening without falter.
For what?
Expansion? Development? Enhancement?
Irrelevant.
Still, the pool stands, acrid and acrimonious,
A testament of impediment against armies aimed at annihilation
Accompanied by a heartbeat hum of wood frogs and marbled salamanders,
Fairy shrimp and deer and bats and tall grasses and–
Eyes?
What a strange sight.
Twelve to thirteen eyeballs in a vernal pool bobbing,
Slipping and sliding in a directionless frothing of murky waters.
With a twang and thump, they sound a mouthless shriek,
Up from the earth, down from the trees,
Soaking the air with a creaking cry,
A despondent, discordant song of reasonless rhyme.
Then you are slipping with outstretched hands,
Grasping for anything, a fistful of silt,
A rooted anchor to slow your descent.
No good.
With a squelch and a swallow, you find yourself face-first in the muck.
Engulfed in the dark and the dank
And the newborn silence of sinking,
You have just enough time and quiet to think
That perhaps we are born reaching.
Ciara Farris is a junior RTVF major at Northwestern, minoring in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry. She is from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and she will not let you forget it.
