From Our Dock - By Somer Salomon

Baptized by one brave green plunge,
a creek-girl emerges
where my city-niece jumped in.
Her laughter
– at finding herself
new and buoyant and part
of this cool jade river-slice –
collides into the briny pines
solemnly edging the shore…
and the echo returns full of
the urgent metallic tones
of the mallards and the geese
that congregate invisibly among the river-grasses:
a riotous halleluiah
filling this river sanctuary,
and kept time by the ripples
that reverently lap, lap, lap
against the dock.

In the afternoon sun,
her smile
scatters yellow diamonds
along the dimpled surface
of this living water.

I want to tell her:
Don’t you know that it’s for you –
that stars collided,
and plates shifted?
That the earth gravely submitted
to being hollowed out
and filled with the ocean’s salty overflow
that now moves placidly to this creek’s marshy end?
Don’t you know that it was for this moment –
so that you could leave your old clothes
crumpled like yesterday’s newspaper
on the dock,
and now with the slim graceful strokes
of a river creature
spin and twirl your waterlimbs
and down-duck-dive?