Florida Song Patrick Keedy Brown ’26 God bless the Gatorland. It smells sweet - the dripping nectar of a tangerine sparkling against the peel. It is my own flesh, was, the prophetic perfect of which our bodies are made. The swamp knows no bounds. It is our stomach. I found a shark tooth beneath an inch of dirt at the bottom of a river. It is our teeth, then, too. Our angels take flight over the cypress sky, leaving feathers in the leaves below, turning into vultures, sunsets turning to constellations above the earth. God bless the Gatorland. Like a God without a temple, the ocean is our wrath. The storms that fester beyond the shore with darkling clouds suspended by an invisible hand. Listen to the hum of cicadas before a rain, and they will answer your prayers with rain, or morning dew, on window glass, the only proof that they were there. Do the cicadas speak with prophetic tongues? God bless the Gatorland. The Greek goddess of summer was Theros. When I search up the meaning of Theros, I find feral; beastly, characterized by a serpent. The summer beats on. 38
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