Poems of Hope Contest: Beaver Pond, Maya Clubine

Maya Clubine is a Canadian writer and MFA candidate at the University of St. Thomas (TX). Her chapbook Life Cycle of a Mayfly won the 2023 Vallum Chapbook Prize, and her poem "Sun Inside My Brain" won the inaugural PFPOI 12-Hour Sonnet Contest. You can find her and her work at mayaclubine.ca. "Beaver Pond" first appeared in the McMaster Journal of Theology & Ministry.

Beaver Pond

I saw him once. Between two quiet moments when everything was cloaked in the warm sunfade and the haze of frog song by the pond. He pierced the surface like a finger in an open wound, leaving a wake behind him big enough to haul a bright new world. Since then, I haven’t seen him. Maybe I scared him away, or maybe he has changed his route for fear of his disrupting me. But still, at every turn, I look for him. I’m left unsatisfied by that first glimpse and go on hungrily searching for another. Something about his presence reassures me. I yearn to know that “Beaver Pond” is not some teasing name a child once gave this place, attracting false hope with a camera on its neck. And so I wait along this bank. I cannot see the dam. I cannot swim. I’m subject only to the ebb and flow of faith with every unrevealing ripple. But even so, each night as my mind wanders through all the violence that one life can bear and must go on rebearing till it ends, I hear a splash come through the open window and think the beaver must be out there still: kicking beneath the surface, rising sometimes to meet the sunlight’s warmth, his toothy smile expanding endlessly. I guess that I should know, since once he let me catch a glimpse.

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