Toadpole Time

This is the time of year when nature is in a hurry. Every day a new flower blooms, every day the canopy of leaves grows. I’ve been spending a lot of time outside with the hound and my camera, taking in the feast.


Over at Today’s Little Ditty, Margaret Simon challenged us to write poems of presence–mindful poems about the present moment. I’ve posted some of my photos on Facebook this month and included a few lines inspired by those moments. I intended to do that again this evening with photographs from the past few days. But somehow my poem decided to travel back in time about 20 years…

Sunlight and Tadpoles

The last of the fiddleheads unfurl
beneath a curtain of green.
An oriole burbles overhead.

Dragonflies patrol the pond,
staking their territories,
searching for mates.

The water shimmers
with sunlight and tadpoles
sparking memories of pails and nets,

of the cries of children long grown.
Overnight, spring slips into summer.
Overnight, tadpoles leave the pond.
–©Buffy Silverman

Mary Lee Hahn has the Poetry Friday Round-up at A Year of Reading–you won’t want to miss the terrific poetry of Marilyn Chin that she’s posted.

8 thoughts on “Toadpole Time

  1. It feels like overnight so much changes, doesn’t it? Your poem captures the spirit of how things change, but remain the same in nature and in our lives. Thank you for sharing your lovely ‘memories’. : )

  2. Thank you for taking me back to my childhood with my (female) cousins, as my sisters and I visited a creek near their home to see the tadpoles. Lovely.

  3. Even though your intention for a poem of NOW turned into a poem of THEN, you captured perfectly the swiftness of time and seasons.

  4. Buffy, this is absolutely beautiful. I love the dragonflies patrolling and the last two lines are just gorgeous.

  5. That last line is really lovely. Thank you for capturing some wonderful photos. I would love to see you and your hound and camera outside finding, observing, thinking. I wish you many moments of this in the coming summer.

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