Dualism is a Never Ending Battle

By Roberta SchulbergGoro

In the semi-sunlight, I squinted at a black-striped stone I never before noticed,
rooted and still,
close to a clump of grasses near the bank,
as the slow, drifting, artificial canal gently rippled around it.

But it must have moved,
like a clock invisibly,
for soon I saw it was free of the grasses,
moving with the drift southward and into the center of the basin.
As it passed by me,
I saw the mustard-colored stone was a yellow-backed sea turtle,
the stripe a fresh-water baby alligator eight inches long, its tail into the water.

The snappy party, alien to this technological water, moved passively with the stream,
floating slowly toward the exposed ledge of dangling toes at the far end of the sculpted cove, and
toward the pumping machinery of the now scarce-used swimming pool
which had recently undergone a renovation,
its sunning deck now protected from a sun shower with
a thickly thatched, gabled roof of reeds placed, they said,
in honor of the new Hawaiian president.