A Requiem For Our Lake

(In memory of Charles Lovett)
we swam from our backyard beaches past Flat Rock and Mrs. Hill’s sandy coast through sunset on St Margaret’s Bay where minnows shimmered and the water was so clear we thought it would never end and we played from dew-soaked morning ‘til werewolves howled or our bellies ached and our hands turned to mud and someone’s mother shouted IT’S TIME TO GO! but we didn’t go not really and winter came with the first white hair from Santa’s beard drifting down from his sleigh onto the heads of bigger kids who stomped once on the ice and waved us on and the rest of us small and fearless zipped across Lovett’s glassy face our sticks clacking like windchimes and pucks slicing clean through metal scrimmaging for Beechville’s team our breath ghosts in frozen air while the girls giggled or shoved us for fun or because they liked us or because we smiled the way their brothers did or we skated slick like Art Dorrington who lit our Coloured Hockey League on fire and we burned fires real fires built high from broken limbs and black spruce where we told stories about the time the forest lit up or the trout we caught seventeen inches fat and glistening up past the tracks or the Great Baptizing when forty seven men were taken under in twenty minutes behind the church and we made smores sticky with puff and hotdogs burnt and bubbling with love and we burned and we burned and we burned and not just fires for fun but trash but tires but weeds the grown folks didn’t want and the smoke curled its long fingers over Lovett Lake—

but we didn’t know it was warning us,
not yet.

A Drop Of Water

From Our Lake

We heard our lake was dying
when the house finches flew frantic—
menacing as vultures, spiraling in circles,
cooing and cawing,
as if warning of a shadow
only we couldn’t see.

But we didn’t believe it.

Not while we still swam, one big extended family,
with grey-scaled American eels slithering beside us.
Not while we dove from Flat Rock, threw each other in laughing,
kicked silk and soot skyward as cold rain lathered our curly afros.

We didn’t believe our lake was dying.

Not while the geese teased the ducks, or elderly brown frogs
played I Spy My Little Fly, as the young ones croaked with crickets.
Not while the brush and thicket grew taller than corn stalks,
and I’m Coming Up echoed across the horizon—
from Long Lake to the rusted old Nine Mile River Bridge.

So we didn’t see the poison in the runoff.
Didn’t ask why the weeds grew thicker each year,
why the frogs went silent,
why the fish surfaced blistered,
why the power plant
grew bigger
and bigger
and bigger—
like an omen we couldn’t name.

And some mornings,
when the sun slips just right through the trees,
you can still see the minnows,
still hear us laughing.
You can see the lake—
our Lovett Lake—
tired as it is,
still trying to give us back what it can.