Estuary, de Robert Rubin

Quiero compartir con todos ustedes este poema de Robert Rubin, autor de Poetry Out Loud y Love Poetry Out Loud.

I’d wait each day for tide to turn
as it released the locks
imprisoning the oyster-boats
moored at the creek’s old docks,

and watch the sand bars disappear
when morning’s current ran,
so knob-kneed piles beneath the pier
across our cove began

to wade in deeper water as
noon’s hour drifted by
and herring gulls upon their posts
abandoned them to fly.

From oysters in the creek’s mud-flats
jets arced in August’s sun
and sawgrass hushed its whispering,
gradually overrun

by inundation of the cove
like milk poured in a glass,
a quiet fullness everywhere
until high tide had passed.

The tide still faithfully returns,
its own lunatic round
predictable as day and night;
and if that creek is drowned

today by swelling seas, its shore
eroded, marsh effaced
and oysters just a memory
of watermen displaced

by new homesites, shellfish disease,
or toxins from upstream,
it is ourselves and not our faith
receding like a dream.