an elemental poem

Water
Wet, clear
Dripping, collecting, pooling
Who owns this water?

The people who pump it into their swimming pool, clean it with cholrine, and swim in it to ease the stress of daily living?
Mr. and Mrs. Mallard who are looking for a place to live?
Those who harness its power for the industries that give us jobs and products to purchase with our pay?
Those who live near it, on it, and in it?
Or those who pum it through miles of desert pipeline to reach their homes?
Those who sail on it?
The companies who bottle it to sell in stores, Or the people who pay for the bottles?

The caretakers
Of all the water on Earth
Those who drink from it
Those who bathe in it
Those who use it, treat it, Return it to its source
All use, and therefore share, ownership and responsibility for this precious resource.

This is a “stolen lines” poem, created from lines “stolen” from a class collection of poems

If something sounds familiar, it probably is.

We stroll past the colors that transform a field
sometimes green and sometimes gray.
Where the sky is a page of water
with an in-your-face honesty to it, a clarity free of reflection.

We search out every horizon
through a veil of distance
in this vast and wondrous land
where everything is clear and still.

Now into the forever shadows,
the canopy lush and thriving above, a carpet beneath our feet
something less tangible courses here,
as we wander through woods that hold no breeze.

The soil is full of marvels and above it,
buckeyes, sycamores, and one black walnut
let their cello depths emerge from the cycle we call life.

Nature, great providder of the rainbow, sends
saffron leaves rusting, cresting into their moment
red-brown pine needles inches thick, a black beetle quick
to burrow back under the rich brown loam.

We listen, we believe,
oh stranger of the future,
oh friend of yesterday,
while a kind of twilight begins to permeate the air

As one hour sweeps into the next,
here it’s proven that time requires
this fleeting moment of eternity be savored — where
fact and fiction are indistinguishable in the moonlit night.