Poetry by Athena Kildegaard
Once, before dusk, we all went down
to the river and then up again to leapfrog
down to the river, only my mother couldn’t
leap so she crawled over us, belly to back like frogs
in spring. Water risen and clouds lost to the west,
a chorus bubbles up, a pimply persistence, a frog
cantata heralding increase. Hurry to find a mate!
Soon enough, herons and egrets will come for frog
heart and golden-eyed minnow and a mate in the reeds.
How much there is to sing of, breathless as frog
at noon, a song echoing desire, our pent-up viral
longing for something more than monitor, a frog-
leap into the world, a breath our lungs pull into a deep
embrace, round and translucent as egg of frog.
Art Information
- “New Morning” © Kelly DuMar; used by permission.
Athena Kildegaard is the author of six books of poetry: Prairie Midden (forthcoming), Course, and Ventriloquy, all from Tinderbox Editions, and Rare Momentum (Red Dragonfly Press, 2006), Bodies of Light (Red Dragonfly Press, 2011), which was a Minnesota Book Award finalist, and Cloves & Honey (Nodin Press, 2012). She also co-edited, with Margaret Hasse, the anthology Rocked by the Waters: Poems of Motherhood. She lives in Morris, Minnesota.
For more information, visit Athena Kildegaard's website.
