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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