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Thursday, April 25, 2013

Fishing


Here's day twenty-five's: submission for NaPoWriMo (a poem a day for the month of April in honor of National Poetry Month):






Fishing


These days I frequently cast my net
over my northern Indiana hometown,
fishing for childhood memories
that swam away, into the dark water
of hidden coves, deep eddies
far from the shadows that stalked
the water’s surface during my adolescence.

I was a fingerling when I left that pond
and spent too much of my time afterward
swimming upstream 
against currents that were more than willing
to throw me at the nearest rock in the river.
It wasn’t pretty.

I eventually reached salt water
on the deck of a boat bound
to catch fish, and had to take a hard look
at this swimmer in the mirror –
face the fears I would confront
about really being at sea.

Dozens of hands
tossed me tow lines when I lost power,
or helped me get started again;
a few even secured me to the dock
so I could float up and down
with the ebb and the flow,
and not drift away again;

where I finally feel safe enough
to take a small skiff onto the water
and toss a net in a secret cove,
hoping to snag one that’s
not too big.

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