Pine Spring Creek

To celebrate National Poetry Month, I'm exploring Amy Ludwig VanDerWater's terrific book, Poems are Teachers. This poem combines two techniques from the book, "Visit a Place,” p. 48 and “Begin with a Question,” p. 182.


Simon Wilkes via Unsplash

I live near a small, spring-fed creek that still has a population of naturally reproducing brook trout. If you are really careful, you can sneak up on them and spend a delightful hour watching them feed in the current.

Pine Spring Creek

Does it matter that there is a creek that still runs clear,
even here in Iowa where the dead soil from fields that
were once prairies now chokes the life out of streams?
Does it matter that there is a place where I might still
crawl on my belly to the stream’s bank-edge
and peer into a pool whose rocky bottom is
filled with the larvae of insects, not manure from hog lots;
a place where at the end of the riffles rests a flotilla
of brook trout, facing upstream, mouths agape, festooned
in haloed spots, fins fluttering, steady in the current, waiting;
a place to lie down under the late afternoon sun and
a warbler’s song, a place to catch a glimpse of the past
as if through the keyhole of a locked door?

– Steve Peterson