Wooden hills above the river

Asked why she wrote on walls above the wooden hills, rain answered:

“I had fever as a child. The fevers lasted longer than my memory. In fever I dreamed, a Florentino joined me in my dreams. We would walk and once we walked before a set of iron gates. The mighty gates spoke to us: intimate, in no hurry. And now the question comes a second time. The poet at the gates once asked me this, standing in the shadows of the talking iron. He wondered why I write. Now you ask the same again. Green and dark is the forest, I answered, for the straightforward pathway has been lost.”

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Fred Pond lives in Concord, North Carolina. After nearly forty years in nursing, he is now retired from most everything except poetry. His poems and prose have appeared in Litmosphere, Prometheus Dreaming, Meat For Tea: The Valley Review, The Puritan and elsewhere. He completed an MFA at Queens University of Charlotte in 2019.