Airboating In The Everglades

painting by John Sokol

Airboating in the Everglades

In a soap dish with a fan, we skim over black water,
through narrow lanes of sea grass, where great herons
and spoonbills, egrets and ibis, thrash up out of thickets

and mangroves at the last possible moment, like
widowers who won’t sell out their homes to the state’s
new highway. Black buzzards and turkey vultures

hover suspiciously, circle, then float a pose for the click
and whir of my brother’s zoom lens. A dozen
alligators, as still as prehistoric stones,

dry their backs in the red mangrove dusk. Further on,
seven wild hogs greet us from their black mud home
and beg the guide for the corn cobs they know he hoards

in the motorbox. The sow - enormous and proud -
watches her skinny daughters and her squealing
spotted sons. Her intense dark eyes pierce the

metal of our corn-cob ruse. Somehow she seems
like the mute voice of the glades, the pig Buddha
whose stare says: we don’t cut through your yards,

we don’t run through your houses while you’re eating
dinner. We don’t gawk and blink false eyes at you
while you sleep.

John Sokol

Posted over on his Facebook page.

- Eclectic Literary Forum, Vol. 5, No. 2