Walking out after my island’s wettest December day
on record, rain drip sounds more slow-footed since dawn,
I pass the tin-roofed boat shed to push aside wet branches
of camellias and azaleas looking for my outdoor cats.
Drops of water glisten on high pines in rising sunlight. Birds sing.
Squirrels chatter. I lift the sharp smell of sap to my nose
after reaching down to toss aside a broken pine bough.
Looking down, I’m stopped by the opened bivalve of deer tracks
like tiny angel’s wings imprinted in the soggy dirt of the path.
Sometime during the rain my neighborhood’s rarest visitor,
pushed out by every new house to wooded bogs
around undevelopable marsh,
graced my yard.
Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He has recent poems in Sky Island Journal, As It Ought to Be Magazine, Poets Reading the News, So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Third Wednesday, and San Pedro River Review.
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