Red-Spotted Newt
by Liz Ahl
Sweating through chores again
in between monsoon rains,
I am impatient and easily irked;
I clatter metal bowls and glassware
in the humid kitchen even though
no one else is present to register
my indignation. Having filled
the white bucket once again to its brim
with peelings and scrapings,
with pits and shells and crumbs,
I stomp it out to the compost pile,
muttering my sullen way through
the obstacle course of newly flung
green pinecones, just wanting to hurl
this mess onto the heap—
and waiting there for me,
slowly crawling from beneath
a half-buried scroll of purple onion skin,
a red spotted newt takes its time,
at home in a damp and seething
paradise of scraps and leavings.
At night this pile belongs
to the racoons and black bear,
but until then, though crows and jays
often visit, it's the Land of Newt,
and I’m softened by the newt's
tenderness, tending, attention, by
how small and soft and moist he is, how
well-fed, and so I gently empty
my bucket, which is now an act
of feeding, which always was an act
of feeding but the newt
helps me remember.
in between monsoon rains,
I am impatient and easily irked;
I clatter metal bowls and glassware
in the humid kitchen even though
no one else is present to register
my indignation. Having filled
the white bucket once again to its brim
with peelings and scrapings,
with pits and shells and crumbs,
I stomp it out to the compost pile,
muttering my sullen way through
the obstacle course of newly flung
green pinecones, just wanting to hurl
this mess onto the heap—
and waiting there for me,
slowly crawling from beneath
a half-buried scroll of purple onion skin,
a red spotted newt takes its time,
at home in a damp and seething
paradise of scraps and leavings.
At night this pile belongs
to the racoons and black bear,
but until then, though crows and jays
often visit, it's the Land of Newt,
and I’m softened by the newt's
tenderness, tending, attention, by
how small and soft and moist he is, how
well-fed, and so I gently empty
my bucket, which is now an act
of feeding, which always was an act
of feeding but the newt
helps me remember.
Liz Ahl is the author of the full-length poetry collections, A Case for Solace (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022) and Beating the Bounds (Hobblebush Books, 2017). Her most recent of several chapbooks is A Stanza is a Place to Stand (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023). She lives in Holderness, New Hampshire.