Creekside
Creekside
Your sadness is not mine to possess
but yesterday afternoon you agreed to walk with me
into our nearby metro park. In the sunshine
we were fellow adventurers in awe
of conventions of gray-headed coneflowers
and bees dancing over pink billy buttons.
Our back and forth talk mostly light and warm
but then twice that dark animal inside you
with tentacles like a squid whipped sharp
and bleak. As we headed off the trail, you gently
held my hand to steady me down a slope to a wide
expanse of dried creekbed, its rocky floor backed dry.
I turned right, drawn to a place with the water gurgled
through its tightened throat. You turned left to look
for fossils and what could have been discarded.
As you walked beyond me I watched this handsome
son of mine, tall and lean with long curls,
make his way to explore what was ahead of him.
The next morning, lined up on the kitchen table,
I found three tiny shells no bigger than a fingernail
exquisite in their scalloped wonder having protected
a delicate creature for a while.
Rikki Santer’s poems have appeared in various publications including Ms. Magazine, Poetry East, Heavy Feather Review, Slab, Slipstream, [PANK], Crab Orchard Review, RHINO, Grimm, Hotel Amerika and The Main Street Rag. My work has received many honors including 2023 Ohio Poet of the Year, Pushcart, Ohioana and Ohio Poet book award nominations as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her collection, Resurrection Letter was grand prize short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and my most recent collection, Shepherd’s Hour, won the Paul Nemser Book Prize from Lily Poetry Review Books.
