I dreamt I walked upon a lake
Whose surface was like glass
And there the water to me spake
Through my mind’s deep morass

‘Look here, beneath your toes,’ it said,
‘And wonder at what’s there
‘For you opted to make your bed
‘Away from cleaner air.’

And there beneath the surface I
Could see the rippled sand
And fishes who were wending by
So far from tempered land

And so I turned my skin to scales
And stepped beneath the waves
And there I found aboveground pales
‘Gainst water’s weird enclaves

The babbling brook that runs along
The road that I call home
Does often sing a quiet song
When it thinks it’s alone

It sings of saplings growing there
Upon the river’s bank
So too it sings of cleaner air
Before the land so stank

And though it flows out to the sea
And passes much that way
First it laments of ‘now’ to me:
The dirt that is today