bubbling over the slick green stones, lichen listening.

Hours went by like days in our wildness. Fish flitted

while imaginary tambourines rang in our minds. Frogs

slipped past underwater the way swallows swept through

trees overhead. We drank, and the cold cleared space all

the way to our hip bones, opened us to some future we

believed could only be good. We were alive. Before they

warned us, before we grew stiff with grief, before the frogs

and the birds and the butterflies began dying. Before

“The End” was not just something in the storybooks.

Before the word abundant became precious.

Title taken from “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas