“Meditation on a Flood Plain Meadow Lit and Shadowed By Sun and Cloud” for The Wood Parcel, Great Meadows Conservation Trust
by Margaret Gibson
Apr, 2023
Meditation on a Flood Plain Meadow Lit and Shadowed By Sun and Cloud
1.
Time is a flood plain. A bone. A seed.
2.
If I’m still enough, in time present I sense time past and time future.
Skeow! yelps the green backed heron as it lifts from a limb
of the bitternut hickory,
and I translate the heron’s monosyllable: Now!
3.
Now also, the sound of a tractor in the corn harvest.
Now, the crunch of my boot soles on the patchy gravel
and dirt trail that weaves past a slump of earth
where a house once in the 18th century was, before it was
razed to make way
for a highway—this whoosh on the edge of stillness.
4.
Just breathe.
5.
Whoever named it “Fearful Swamp”
was not a Wangunk.
They wove cattail mats, ate shoots and roots, fished
the deep river, brook, and cove.
They transformed plants into medicine.
6.
Time is the tractor that uncovers their bones while planting
seed corn, early summer.
7.
The photograph of an old, iconic American Elm in nearby Old Wethersfield
shows it to be 15 feet in diameter.
Now, as the ash trees die off, we plant American elms, disease resistant.
8.
Time is a cornfield. A green pond. A bench with a vista—
sedge grass and meadow swamp, bands of pale brown
and yellow and dusky green that whisper
September,
9.
September, after a summer’s hard drought kept all hands
filling five-gallon
plastic jugs
to water the new bare root plantings of tupelo, hackberry, tulip poplar—
bringing back the indigenous.
10.
Time is an emerald ash borer.
11.
In time past, Beaver Brook, considered by some settlers inconvenient,
was redirected.
It was common once, this draining of the flood plains for corn fields, turf farms,
suburbs, highways.
Where, where exactly, is remnant flood plain swamp and forest
now?
12.
If, with your whole body in sunlight and shadow you read the land,
you may
sense a covenant
that links sycamore, migrant oriole, corn farmer, native pharmacist, alluvial
silts, arrow root, and black willow
into one flooding of water wind sunlight earth.
Why would you want to alter that covenant?
13.
Last year’s planting of young elms unfurls its leaves in time future,
making the present moment
steeper, greener.
But you must not ignore the doe, mangled alongside the concrete
traffic barrier,
center lane, Route 3.
14.
Time past and time future abide
in time present
beneath this canopy of towering sycamore,
burgeoning elm, swamp maple, ash.
15.
Time is a flood plain. A bone. A seed.
Margaret Gibson, State Poet Laureate of Connecticut (2019-2022), is the author of 13 books of poems from LSU Press, including most recently Not Hearing the Wood Thrush, 2018, and The Glass Globe, 2021. Awards include the Lamont Selection for Long Walks in the Afternoon; the Melville Kane Award, the Connecticut Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. Gibson is Professor Emerita, University of Connecticut. margaretgibsonpoetry.com
The mission of the Great Meadows Conservation Trust, Inc. (gmct.org) is to promote—for the benefit of the general public—the preservation of the Great Meadows and environs along the Connecticut River located generally within the towns of Wethersfield, Rocky Hill and Glastonbury; including the preservation of the rural landscape, the floodplain and water resources, marshland, swamps, woodland, farmland, open spaces, the plant and animal life therein, and unique historic and scenic sites.