I hold it in my hand,
this small dark shape
in a corona of dust
I found behind the vase
of wilted flowers:
no bigger than a fingernail,
tightly folded back legs,
a furze of toes, skin green-black
and tight over the skull,
closed protruding eyes.
It must have died
a long time ago, this tiny frog
to gather so much dust
maybe up behind the blinds
that rising and lowering
count my days.
A great silence surrounds it.
I gather up the flowers,
walk slowly down the back steps
to the edge of my little local forest
holding this sliver of what once lived,
release the almost weightless thing
to the October trees, release the flowers
still speaking to me of their beauty.
—
Ralph Earle is the author of Everything You Love Is New (Redhawk, 2024) and The Way the Rain Works (Sable Books, 2015). A New England native, he has lived in North Carolina for 40 years. Ralph has worked as a poetry teacher, writer, editor, bookstore proprietor, technical writer, and website designer. Thrice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in The Sun, Tar River Poetry, The Carolina Quarterly, Sufi Journal, and elsewhere.
