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Poetry: Florida Suite
by Linda Frank
Big Sugar
Once you could look in any direction across
the Everglades and see water, acres and acres
of water studded with thousands of islands
a wild solitude of sawgrass, thickets of shrub and vine
muted greens and browns speckled with white
string lilies, violet bay bean, lotus and periwinkle.
Now ibis, egret and heron have almost disappeared
from the swamps and marshland.
Now the eastern glades are suburbia
the central glades scarred by reservoirs and sewers
and the northern rim spoiled
by sugar cane fields owned by Big Sugar, the Cubans
who abandoned their sugar farms to Castro and now
run the world’s largest sugar empires in Florida.
Phosphorous run-off and fertilizer fuel
the explosion of algae, smother the wetlands, choke
the sea turtles and manatee. Crawfish and snails
crawl out of Lake Okeechobee searching for oxygen.
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[Distillate © HA&L + Linda Frank {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]
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