Catherine Zickgraf has performed her poetry in Madrid, San Juan, and three dozen other cities. But due to illness, her main jobs now are to hang out with her family and write more poetry. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Pank, Victorian Violet Press, and The Grief Diaries. Her new chapbook, Soul Full of Eye, is published through Aldrich Press and is available on Amazon.com.

Significance

My hill erodes during rain, filling the stream banks with marled
earth. The great tap roots appear—they’ve grown toward the sound
of smooth stones and foam, wet snake through the ground.
There’s wisdom in my trees. The writhing and gnarled

arms are old—their legs reach through dirt to drink from the rill.
The forest echoes with sipping roots. Wings murmur and perch in leaves
over lyrics of splashing wavelets. The floor’s soaked in rain. Mud teethes
the pebbles that emerge in its gums—so much lives on the bank of my hill.

I am one puzzle piece. Earth’s living things number more than its sand.
My stream is a strand against the Nile’s width. But it’s the lifeblood
of this tract. The greens thrive when it’s stable and gulp in the flood.
So all so small, we melt in the memory of the land.

We can mire ourselves in war. We can delight in our small mirth,
but our feet are like ants on the lithic face of Earth.