Iris Stalks

Today I make history. I am just a small pond. I have no fish, but dragonflies visit my reeds after the sun wakes over the eastern hill. A poet lives in a small hut by the banana plant at my southwest corner. Every morning he comes to my shore and washes his bowl after eating his rice. In the summer he admires my dragonflies. In the winter he once walked across me when my ripples hardened in the cold. In autumn he collects leaves from my sandy beach to arrange by colour in the corner of his hut. And every spring he stops to listen to the croaking of frogs, to the insistence of the breeze through just-leafing trees. And today I make history. For centuries in all the fields and all the ponds around me, here and in far-off lands, the frog has been praised for its croak. But after today, that will change. The iris stalks are rustling as if in anticipation.

old pond—

the frog has jumped

into the water’s sound