Passion played about the water’s skirt a hundred years ago.
Queens of Spring, the Naiads held court. Children came of age.
Clean rain filled the pond then and rapids made the watercourse.
So much — life was nourished here, but, not in the decades since.
Refuse lines the water’s edge — a Crone sits there now on the stage.

The pond behind the house reeks now — where children once swam.
Here unbelievers’ heap debris; rusting shopping carts and old beer cans.
Vermin skitter in the high weeds — rats as large as small dogs play—
where wunderkin skated in winters past — no thing of beauty remains.
No fish swim, no frogs’ croak, a thin stream like spittle meanders away.

Xenophobic, the Crone nests; she plucks fragments for her home —
yards of plastic polymer chains afloat — dripping algae walls her throne.
Zepher winds refuse to come; the ancients call the gales to scour bone.
Anger fills the Naiad’s heart, for desecration, must be atoned. Poison water
seeps down now, sickening defilers; who blinds them, they may never know.

[Deborah Guzzi opted not to provide a biography.]