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
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