Low Sun Over Home Waters

Nets are hauled and homeward go the shrimp boats rolling slow and easy on a sunset path, their droning engines chugging over a rippling seafoam. In the mangrove swamp an egret sets its white sails and glides upwards upon hot winds. The sky opens for its passage leading it through a cloudless window. Cypress roots grip the darkening water. their knees just above a brackish deep. Mosquitoes dance in the dank as shadows reach inwards. Tonight on the bayou, grills will be heated, pots filled, while fishing nets are neatly reefed and mended by rough and ready hands. Children will skip and play in the barefooted calm of late evening, until carried away to their cots sleepily listening to anhinga and loon chant their native calls beneath a far from sleeping lakeside moon.