​POETRY  -  
          With a Theme of Time 

"It’s alive, I realized, and this time saw"
                        
                           Photo by  Weebly                               

Banana Slug
by Dan Liberthson

Sketch by Cassandra Mettling-Davis 

So bright yellow it seemed surreal―
kid’s plastic trick, fat pepper slice.
Immobile, unknowing death or life,
it lay on the damp path’s shoulder
amid twigs, leaf litter, and crumbled soil
split between hard sun, soft shade.
 
And I forgot it. Stepped past thinking
this and that on the way to what
needed to be done. Until an hour later
I took that path again and found it
six inches from where it was then.       
 
It’s alive, I realized, and this time saw
the snub curved snout, sex sack
bulging at the neck, radiating antlers
reaching out, back ridge subtly
s-curved as it moved imperceptibly
to any briefly present being.
 
It was then I saw the trees growing.
Sensed the muscles in their limbs
bulk and twist as they made themselves
thicker, longer, through my watching
years. When I looked down again,                    
the slug was gone, and I had no idea
what time it was.
 
Author’s Note: A version of this poem was published in the book Animal Songs (©2010) by Dan Liberthson.
Illustration by Cassandra Mettling-Davis with permission.

Vertical Divider

Dan Liberthson was born in Rochester, New York and attended Northwestern University and SUNY at Buffalo (PhD, English). He has retired from a career as a medical writer, and lives in San Francisco and Cottage Grove, Oregon. He has published five books of poetry and has published individual poems in anthologies and journals, including The Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, South Coast Poetry Journal, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Chaminade Literary Review and Triggerfish. He was Secretary of the Oregon Poetry Association (2019-2022), and took second place in the William Stafford Memorial Award Poetry Contest (2020) and the Maine Poets Society Contest (2022). He also published The Bluejay Contrivance, a spy novel, and The Golden Spider, a middle-grade fantasy novel. For more information, visit liberthson.com.

Other works in this issue:
Poetry:
​In a Room on a Courtyard in Firenze
The Octopus Pot

Vertical Divider

We Welcome Comments