— Photo by Bernd Schade
“What I grew up seeing as a wall of green
is really a thousand species of the rare
and seldom seen. The average swamp
is a death of stumps and snakes
the eye teases from the submerged vegetation,
hardly knowing what’s imagined
from what the brown water covers….’’
— From “The Faithful,’’ by Cleopatra Mathis (born 1947), New Hampshire based poet and professor
