Best Poems Written by John Michael Campbell

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.

Copyright © John Michael Campbell | Year Posted 2022