Lielupe Riverbank, July 2013

The Zemgale sun slants warmest today at
seven in the evening, brushing across green
not-ready wheatfields, they shimmer against
black backgrounded trees, the light 

surges across the gentle oscillation of the stalks
each lit its incandescent instant through
our eyelenses, it is impossible to move just now. 

Black swallows swoop in arcing glide, high
above this landscape cut by its meandering
Lielupe/big river, not so big really, we can
find a small sand clearing at the banks. 

Water’s down, a few bathers sun or venture
down to the edge heavy and shallow this year
with canary grass grown high and ignited
by this same day’s seven twenty sun
and water lilies, Nymphaeaceae, thick
with flowers pink and white and something yellow. 

The river weeds under a foot or two of water
will slow you down, caress your legs, ensnare
and likely leave you with a bit of a river rash later
that evening, the price for seeing giant minnows
in the shallows engorged in aquatic feast. 

We find a tall grassed patch partly shaded by willow
and by seven thirty are sunbathing with honey Schnapps
and black bread and—yes, festive caviar—
and now the sweet conceit of imagining Tolstoy
not really so long dead, doing the same as we, simply at his dacha,
streams not really so far away at Yasnaya Polonya,
across the Russian border.

FREDERICK SHIELS

Frederick Shiels has been teaching university history and writing poetry for 45 years. He leans toward history, but has published poems with science themes, elegy, and memory in Deep South Review, NewVerse News, Hudson Anthology, and was the recipient of the first prize in the Woodward World Poetry Contest in 2017.