Join The Dillydoun Review in celebrating National Poetry Month with

A Poem by Maria Berardi

For Soo

The precise day everything wakes up:
the sunshine bright and warm, the breeze cold,
the skin unaccustomed to feeling air again.

Four childrens’ muddy hands
entwined with four garter snakes,
all eight of them stooped over a low-lying creek,

the kids huddled in curiosity,
the snakes dipping and swerving
with yearning for freedom.

They are released simultaneously,
a race of S-es across the surface
of the thin water,

still sleepy with cold,
still dull with burrow-dirt,
but pumping along the bright wet,

all four aimed for the other side
and a rock on which
to curl and bask.

The children are delighted,
proud, dirty, and bright-haired.
It is Sunday afternoon and this is just the beginning.

Maria Berardi‘s poems have appeared online, in print, in university literary journals, meditation magazines, and at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities. Her first book, Cassandra Gifts, was published in 2013 by Turkey Buzzard Press, and she is currently at work on her second, Pagan, from which these poems are excerpted. She lives in Colorado at precisely 8,888 feet above sea level. Her process is one of listening for transmissions and trying to catch them on paper before they dissipate: the glimpse, the complicated knowledge.