Under the brown water

— Photo by Bernd Schade

“What I grew up seeing as a wall of green

is really a thousand species of the rare

and seldom seen. The average swamp

is a death of stumps and snakes

the eye teases from the submerged vegetation,

hardly knowing what’s imagined

from what the brown water covers….’’

— From “The Faithful,’’ by Cleopatra Mathis (born 1947), New Hampshire based poet and professor