Have decided to write about WATER some more. I often walk by our local rivers, I spent 10 years as a child living by a big river, and I spent several years living in a bayside town. It is hard to put into words what "water" actually means to me, it is so much part of my own bloodlines. Isn't that true for all of us?

FLASH FLOODS

Elsewhere in the country
tragic losses - people,
land, livelihoods. I loved
the picture of young men
playing a piano salvaged
from mud.

We who walk the once-
swamplands are glad
someone created channels
the waters could fit into
find a direction in
be fully self-expressed
as rivers.

Photographs catch an
aftermath, a mere suggestion
of force exercised - tossed
saplings, reed slapped on fence
a tight weaving, admirable in any
gallery, museum.

The silence
of drowned frogs cannot
be photographed.
Can it be we who have
engineered this local
and sudden extinction?

Or the way things are
simple as artistry
plain to the eye
uncomplicated by fear,
past trauma, story.
Part of a process we'll
never fathom.