Tag: Poetry About Fishing

Gone Fishing

A storefront window on Main Street
displays a collection of wooden rainbow
trout. Carved and painted to look real,
their speckled bodies curl in mid-jump

next to a model ship with billowing sails,
an engraved sign reading Jeremiah Hale,
Attorney at Law, and a set of scales.
The lights in the office are off.

Perhaps the attorney has gone fishing,
wades knee-deep in the cold river,
hears the kingfishers shriek from bank to bank,
watches silvery fish dance in the reeds.

Perhaps he sits in the dusty backroom
on a desk that is suffocating with papers
and dreams of a ship with white sails
that will come to carry him far away.

About the Author: Agnes Vojta grew up in Germany and now lives in Rolla, Missouri where she teaches physics at Missouri S&T and hikes the Ozarks. She is the author of Porous Land, The Eden of Perhaps, and A Coracle for Dreams, all published by Spartan Press. Together with eight other poets she collaborated on the book Wild Muse: Ozarks Nature Poetry (Cornerpost Press, 2022.) Her poems have appeared in a variety of magazines; you can read some of them on her website agnesvojta.com.

Image Credit: John William Lewin Fish catch and Dawes Point, Sydney Harbour (1813) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee.

Darkroom

He loves the slow and lonely work.
In the orange glow, he watches
shadows grow on the paper,
darkening shapes blossom.

From his test prints, he knows
how long the photo needs to soak
in the developer, when to move
it to the stop bath, to the fixer.

At the end of the day, ten portraits
will hang on the drying line:
acrobats, jugglers, stilt-walkers,
dancers – street performers, captured

mid-flow. He dislikes poses,
and circus acts that are now
all about break-neck speed.
Speed is not important to him.

He bicycles, travels by train,
eschews the subway, walks instead
unbothered by his luggage – how
can he see if he is underground?

He does not show his photographs.
They cover the walls in his house:
clowns, mimes, and fire-eaters, none
looking towards the audience.

About the Author: Agnes Vojta grew up in Germany and now lives in Rolla, Missouri where she teaches physics at Missouri S&T and hikes the Ozarks. She is the author of Porous Land, The Eden of Perhaps, and A Coracle for Dreams, all published by Spartan Press. Together with eight other poets she collaborated on the book Wild Muse: Ozarks Nature Poetry (Cornerpost Press, 2022.) Her poems have appeared in a variety of magazines; you can read some of them on her website agnesvojta.com.

Image Credit: John William Lewin Fish catch and Dawes Point, Sydney Harbour (1813) Public domain image courtesy of Artvee.