Blue Pike Night

In golden dawn of day Fish the color of lake and sky Swam Lake Erie wide in eye. Twenty thousand years past Fins chased by glaciers: Blue pike survived Until too many waves of our breed Swept them from the lake With taint and nets of greed In a hundred years-long dusk. Too much like Sandburg’s Buffalo Dusk The Blue pike and their fishermen are gone: Too much chased from ice to nets To gray smoke dusk, Black empty night – The Blue pike and the men who saw them Gone.