My Body as Rock Creek Park

by Deborah Hefferon

 

My body meanders through

the city on a sweet braided network

of nectar-reconnaissance:                                               wild,

 

wooded, quarried, and scrambled.

Smooth as packed sandy soil,

its eroded banks echo a Kingfisher’s scolding.

 

My body is like the shallow cap

of the red oak’s acorn, a patchwork

of outcroppings, panic grass and nettles,

 

rising to the crowns of white oaks,

strumming with cicadas,                                             darting

among blue damselflies.

 

Half a billion-year-old rippled

rock angles through polypody ferns

and paw paw                                         leaping              down to the wooded

 

stream valley, splashing into clarity.

My body is a therapist, a refuge,

a samara                                               whirling                        in full flower          and in bud.       

 

* * * * *

Deborah Hefferon is a recently retired cross-cultural communication trainer in Washington DC who morphed into a full time writer during the pandemic. She has had poems and essays published in Prospectus: A Literary Offering (spring 2021), Teach. Write.: A Writing Teachers’ Literary Journal (Spring-Summer 2021), District Lines (Winter 2018, Politics & Prose, Washington, DC), Ekphrastic Review (2020), Story64, anderbo.com, The Washington Post Sunday Magazine, and other print and online publications.