EVERGLADES

In the tangle of hammock leaves,

faces and hands overlap in shadow.

Hidden deep in the mangroves, someone mourns

all that’s been lost from the place—Calusa shells,

crushed to dust, the moon moving into darkness,

through the tangle of Everglades hammock leaves,

the night rising up, blank to sorrow

indifferent to who comes or goes in darkness.

Hidden deep in the mangroves, someone mourns

the water tapped away,

watches the lovely rising of light

in the tangle of hammock leaves.

Hidden life fills the shadows;

the sky takes on fragile colors; still,

hidden deep in the mangroves, someone mourns

the quiet, slow ruin of such a place.

Unseen birds flutter and cry.

The Everglades smolder and ash drifts

through the tangle of hammock leaves.

Hidden deep in the mangroves, someone mourns.

Eleanor Swanson's recent poetry collection is Trembling in the Bones (Ghost Road Press, 2006). Her journal publications include Missouri Review, Black Warrior Review, High Plains Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, and Southern Review.   Swanson has received the A. E. Coppard Prize for Fiction, a Fiction Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship in Literature (fiction). Her  first poetry collection, A Thousand Bonds: Marie Curie and the Discovery of Radium, won the Ruth Stevens Manuscript Competition (NFPS Press) and was a finalist for the 2004 Colorado Book Award.  She lives in Denver and is a professor of English at Regis University.