Dragons by the River
Image by cobalt123
All afternoon along the Yellow Dog River
      dragonflies hover,
sunlight shooting off their wings.
      then rise languorously,
      while beneath them
greenish water ripples.
Trout jumps up, disturbed from sleep,
      flips once, disappears.
      Small brown butterflies,
sprightly wood nymphs, cluster on red berries.
Day draws into late afternoon,
      shadows leap like poplars.
Moss makes a quiet cover for the whitetail doe
      edging closer.
Sitting on a rock near the river,
      I breathe in and out carefully.
On a stone next to me, a small frog crouches,
      cocks its head to one side.
I don’t move my foot, or hand, or blink an eye.
Little frog croaks low in his bulbous throat,
      then higher still he sings.
Frog’s voice joins the crickets and bees buzz.
Grasshoppers snap their legs in long grass.
In my head, I write lyrics to my companion’s
notes. Each word scattered like phlox petals
      amongst fiddlehead ferns.
All around us, the silver dragonflies flit to the tempo.
One rises, circles, before caught
      on an updraft.
For a moment, they hang in mid-air, motionless.
Then ascend
      one after another,
       after another.
Poem by Rosalie Sanara Petrouske previously published in River Poems: An Anthology on the Allure of Rivers (Lilly Press)
