PROSE POEM
DAVID GREEN
The Day After
Where the river slows, an armada of bees drones through the jewel-weed. Close at hand, the sandpiper, black needle of a beak, pokes and cross-stitches the mud. Rice grows wild, reaching from the bank. One by one, grains break open tasting of nuts and grass. The raised paddle drips once, twice as we drift. Suddenly up from the marsh the huffing of great white wings, beat by beat pushing eastward, southeast, south, southwest to west, tacking over and down behind the river-grass. As though we could sail across these fields, then come back and start again. The river rests, dark in its own flowing.
Concord River, MA
September 12, 2001
David Green is a clinician working at a community health center in Boston, MA with Spanish-speaking people from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. His previously published poems have appeared in the Lyric Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and Pangyrus.
