Today's poem is Paddling the marshes by Erin Covey-Smith. It is read by Samaa Abdurraqib.
Paddling the marshes
You like to think you have a deep inner life,
but you don't: all is laid bare to the world.
To have a soul is to be diaphanous. Skin is
nothing if not permeable, a heart nothing if not
tide-driven. We're passing through permanence,
and it passes right on through us.
Canoeing the back marshes, egrets and herons
like pterodactyls (they have the bones of dinosaurs—
what do you have within) alighting in briney trees;
the grasses cow-licked every which-way from high waters;
an azure flash of kingfisher, sonant stir of salt water.
That tug inside, the longing pull, is this tide here, churning
through channels, pulsing blood slow, breathing your breaths, in
and out. And in the furthest backwater before the brittle-boned pine
leaning ancient over the banks—silence of no roads, no planes.
It could be three hundred years in the
past, or tomorrow.