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Saturday, April 12, 2014

THE SOMETIMES LAKE

by Laura Rodley


Image source: The Heart of New England


Low in the pasture slings a wide clear lake,
winds rippling its surface without a break.
Wide and wider still each day it grows
fed by the runoff of fast melting snow,
so wide today whole pasture is sheer green
from water with slivers of icy sheen,
tall white birch and pine reflected, the sky
and all its clouds, rippling, three feet high.
The Sometimes Lake stands, it legs quickly moving,
mallards land, peddle round, flick tails, grooving.
No herons yet, no tiny frogs, just ducks
and Canadian Geese  who press their luck
landing where other times they’d have to duck
no farmers treasure they, wings tightly tucked.


Laura Rodley’s New Verse News poem “Resurrection” appears in The Pushcart Prlze XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses (2013 edition). She was nominated twice before for the Prize as well as for Best of the Net. Her chapbook Rappelling Blue Light, a Mass Book Award nominee,  won honorable mention for the New England Poetry Society Jean Pedrick Award. Her second chapbook Your Left Front Wheel is Coming Loose was also nominated for a Mass Book Award and a L.L.Winship/Penn New England Award. Both were published by Finishing Line Press.  Co-curator of the Collected Poets Series, she teaches creative writing and works as contributing writer and photographer for the Daily Hampshire Gazette.  She edited As You Write It, A Franklin County Anthology, Volume I and Volume II.