‘The Walk’: A Poem by Martin Elster

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The Walk

Whether you call it a walk or a run,
some animals tread on the water for fun,
to flee, chase their food, or show off for their mate.
Grebes, doing a dazzling dance for their date,

slap their lobed and impressively wide and flat feet
on the waves twenty times every second. How sweet!
How neat! How fleet! Who can beat it? A lizard,
long, slender and green, it can walk like a wizard

(or Jesus) on water. Long toes create pockets
of air. It’s eye-opening glimpsing one rocket
across the expanse. Some tropical ants
sport stingers of fire. (Hope there’s none in your pants!).

They construct living rafts. By the thousands they stride,
frantically crossing a perilous tide,
a torrent or flood. (In their way? Step aside
or, better yet, vacate the county and hide!)

There are bugs on the water that never will sink
and, that being so, they’ll not drown in the drink.
Pond skaters and skippers and skimmers all slide.
(Though they think they are “striding,” it’s more of a “glide.”)

They hunt insects and spiders. And near them, small snails
knock about upside down—the feat never fails
to cause me to scratch my big mystified head.
The water snails look as if they’re playing dead,

yet they move all about. Do they ever get dizzy?
Unlike us, they do not, though they’re awfully busy.
There’s a spider as big as your palm. It can float
and can walk and can skate and can row like a boat,

yet it’s deadly to tadpoles and pocket-sized birds.
It goes by the name “fishing spider.” Those words
sound adorable. Do not be fooled! It’s a killer—
not of us—but of frogs or a drenched caterpillar.

And last, there’s a mammal that walks on the ocean,
talkative, gentle, and full of emotion—
far more than the bugs in those ponds when I’m golfin’.
I speak of that curious creature the dolphin.

It can walk on the water by using its tail.
And it sure as hell looks like it’s having a whale
of a time. Well that’s all for these critterly quirks.
The trait they all share? They make use of what works.

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Martin Elster (born 1954) is an award-winning poet with a background in rhythm as a percussionist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. Martin has won four Pushcart nominations as well as Best of the Net and prizes from the Science Fiction Poetry Association, Poetry Nook, and Rhymezone, among others. His most recent book is Celestial Euphony (Plum White Press, 2019).