— Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts
I’d seen the water churning with dozens or maybe hundreds
of ponderous pairs a month or so ago — the toads
mating hard, the males gripping
the backs of the females with horny tubercles.
Then, underwater, the unseen clumps of eggs assembled
their futures. When a friend texted me
the toadlets had emerged, I drove over, had to
stand still to see them, squatted down low
and peered into the grass —
so much smaller than I’d imagined,
the size of my little fingernail,
carved like ebony totems you’d carry in your pocket,
fully formed miniatures of what they’d become.
One was here, one was there, one right next to my foot.
I was afraid if I moved I’d crush them.
Their single necessity pulled me from lethargy —
oh, I needed to be taken out of myself like that, flung
from one life into another, scrambling through the ground ivy,
making a dash for it, so small, so brave, so much at stake.
And for a little while I didn’t feel the weight,
or rather, the gravity — only a few hundred yards away,
our plot, the granite slab already inscribed
with our birth dates, our names, that dash held open —
How light the toadlets were — hopping
onto the tops of the clover leaves without bending
a single one, zigzagging up and down
the grassy bank, falling down
and rising up again between the blades.
Click here to read Wendy Drexler on the origin of the poem.
Image by Bostonian13 on Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Wendy Drexler:
First of all, I cheated. What I mean is that I went to see the toadlets knowing that I would want to write about them. Having an intention is never a good plan for a poem. At least I didn’t know where the poem would go. I often start by describing what I see, as I did here, and then just keep writing and hoping that the poem can tell me where it wants to go. I did a little research to learn the word “tubercles,” debated whether it was too esoteric to use, decided I wanted to use it. I stole “single necessity” from Anne Dillard’s “the perfect freedom of single necessity” from her essay “Living Like Weasels” in her beautiful book Teaching a Stone to Talk. That phrase has long lingered in a back channel of my mind. The surprise, or turn, in the writing of the poem came when I connected the phrase about the toadlets “making a dash for it” with the fact, which I’d forgotten until then, that my husband and I have a plot in this cemetery and where, on our inscribed granite slab, the dash between our birth and death dates has been held open. That little dash that carries the gravity of our brief lives.
Wendy Drexler is a recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her fourth collection, Harvest of What Remains, received honorable mention for the Paul Nemser Prize and was published in February 2026 by Lily Poetry Review Books. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Mid-American Review, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and The Threepenny Review, among others. She was awarded the 2025 E.E. Cummings prize from the New England Poetry Club. A recipient of the Juror's Prize for Art on the Trails, Southborough, MA, in 2021, Wendy served as poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, from 2018-2023, as programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club from 2016–2024. She currently serves on the Club’s advisory board.
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