It is late summer, the kind of evening when heat clings to wood and skin, even after the sun has slipped behind the trees. A dock stretches out over the water, quiet except for the occasional creak beneath bare feet. The lake lies still, almost mirror-like, its surface holding its breath between day and night.
A child stands at the edge, holding a stone. It’s too smooth to skip, but that hardly matters. The stone is still worth throwing. When it hits the water, the splash touches the quiet—not loud, just certain. Laughter follows, thin and sharp. It doesn’t just fill the air. It shifts something.
What follows is not just a poem, but a moment re-entered. A stillness remembered and re-seen. A world suspended between day and night, silence and sound, childhood and everything after.
Skimming Light
By Kerry Ann Wiley
The Dock radiated the day’s warmth—
still pulsing with heat beneath bare feet.
Long after the sun has gone.
Boards hum low.
Weightless footsteps leave no mark.
Water mirrors sky—
fractured, silver-edged.
Stillness, not silence.
Not quite memory.
Not quite now.
A stone, lifted—
small hand, tight grip.
Too round. Too smooth.
Still worth the throw.
Ripple breaks.
Then laughter,
thin and sudden,
carrying more future than sound.
It lingered—
not long,
just long enough to be real.
No one asks the question.
The question is always there.
A breath.
Then:
Did anything go missing,
or did it arrive
in pieces?
Another stone arcs.
This one skips—
once,
then again,
then under.
No need to count.
The splash answers everything.
Even what wasn’t asked.
Light holds a little longer.
Long enough.
No name for this.
Not peace.
“Skimming Light” rests in a quiet, familiar moment: a lake, a dock warmed by sunlight, a child holding a stone.
Nothing moves forward in the usual sense. The poem doesn’t press for emotion or push a story. Instead, it invites attention—to the small tensions in the body, to the silence that surrounds them, to the feeling that something just out of reach is waiting.
The images in the poem do more than describe a place—they hold feeling. The dock is warm, not from the present sun, but from the memory of it. Footsteps pass without a sound, not because the path is empty, but because no one wants to disturb what has been left behind.
The water, mirroring a fractured sky, feels held in suspension. Nothing moves, yet something shifts quietly. The moment ends, but it does not leave; it lingers. When the child throws the stone, it isn’t about the stone. It is about what it stirs up.
The splash is more than noise. It is a mark in time. It breaks the surface and reveals something that had been hiding just beneath. Then comes the laughter: sudden, thin, and carrying more than sound. It arrives without reason, and although it fades quickly, it leaves behind the warmth of having been there at all.
The poem asks quietly, “Did anything go missing, or did it arrive in pieces?” It is a feeling to be held. It points to how people carry change—silently, sometimes unknowingly—until something small reveals it.
By the time the poem reaches its final lines, the light is nearly gone. It holds just a little longer, as if offering time to absorb what has happened. In the stillness that follows, nothing appears to have changed, yet everything feels subtly different.
The splash subsides, and the laughter fades. Light lingers briefly, then slips away. Something has passed through. Time moves on, indifferent, but the moment remains. It was never meant to last—only to be lived.
Discover more from Wiley's Walk
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.