by Leonard Neufeldt

The pond wants to drop its utter sheen of light
into the earth and take the sky with it, a sky
that marks the distance to trees at the far edge.

Between this morning’s change and the opposite
shore the water is cold and deep. I’m mired
in mud, water seeping into my shoes, feet

and knees locked, ready for me to lean forward
with shears blunt as an unspoken prayer, wondering
which movement will reach and sever a veined stem

of the pond where a face floats upward among
the water’s umbilicals, turns, fades the way it came,
weighted or afraid. But flowers of the pond

are dreaming slowly open—exiles returning
in ones and twos, coming furtively forward,
as in the story of a wide field, broken stone wall,

shoulder-high grass, twin towers of trees, a larger
symphony of blue, and children yearning toward it,
faces pale, smiling, others arriving on the margin.

The sun like a fire-bird, balancing picture and pond.
No wind to enter the quiet, no agitation from the deep.
The flowers are white. They’ve opened everywhere.

Leonard Neufeldt’s poems have appeared throughout Canada and the U.S. His work has also been published in Europe, the Far East and India. His sixth collection of poems is currently on a press editor’s desk. He hails from Yarrow, B.C.