Prayer at Hill’s Pond

    After Jane Mead

Jesus, I am tired.

Every day we come to this pond, swamp-smelling 
and overgrown with fertilizer runoff from the houses up the hill, 
a scum of algae on dark water. 
The park is overused, children tromping delicate green marginals, 
dogs chasing mallards and black ducks from the water, 
boys throwing rocks at the great blue heron. Life 
beating down life. 

This is the closest I come to church. The dog and I walk 
the path beneath the vault of trees. We watch 
for the return of redwing blackbirds in the spring 
and Canada geese in the fall. We listen to bullfrogs 
croaking out the summer night and hear before we see 
crappies jumping out of the pond on the hottest days of August. 
We are transfixed by giant turtles moving in the shallows, 
prehistoric and delicate and inexorable. 

It is all too much 
and not enough. I meet it empty 
and will not be filled. 

In the middle of the pond, three “floating gardens,” 
bits of plastic garbage zip-tied together 
and sown with weeds, some Eagle Scout’s project 
to filter the water and add interest to a landscape 
that, if anything, needs less. How much we destroy 
in our efforts to make things better. How hard, 
in the middle of my life, to know what’s right. 
How much regret is enough?  Who could forgive me?  
Dear God, I pray. Dear God, please help.

Tonight, I listen to the crickets, singing sex
into the late October night, one last fling 
before they die of cold, having buried their eggs 
to hatch when the earth stirs in spring. 
Not so much a generational hand-off as 
a Hail Mary into the future. They have done 
all they could and still they sing.