Tag: heron

The Heron by Michael Neal Morris

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The Heron

All the lakes
diminished
by an irrational summer
and even this made pond
its aorta a creek
that brings its blood
from somewhere under the highway
has shrunk, deceptive green
where perch swam,
ducks begged, and geese waited
to torture joggers.

A heron is hiding
in the yellowing grass,
at the bank. Her pale gray feathers
her thin, unsure neck,
her small eyes,
remind me of an old woman
alone in her assisted living room
too lonely for television
waiting for a dinner of cold fish.

*

Michael Neal Morris has published several stories, poems, and essays in print and online. His most recent books are Based on Imaginary Events (Faerie Treehouse Press), Haiku, Etc., and The Way of Weakness. He lives with his family just outside the Dallas area and teaches Composition and Creative Writing at Dallas College’s Eastfield campus.

The Great Blue Heron by Johanna Caton

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The Great Blue Heron

was as still as a hermit praying, so dusk-blue
that he seemed to be a shadow among shadows

of trees, where he stood at the edge of the brown
wood by the browning pond, behind the grey,

metal, mobile home where my nephew lived now
since his divorce, after his wife sold the house

he’d built and gave him nothing. The heron
looked an eccentric creature, with that kink

in his long noodle-neck and that dagger-shaped
head and beak. His flying thrilled us though, like

an acrobat: the sailing waves of his flight-path,
the rippling blades of wide wings. He was pure

drama – he could have declaimed Hamlet. My
nephew felt it, too. We named him Shakespeare.

He outclassed everything else, lifting the tone
of our existence, of our very seeing, our breathing.

The pond was the heron’s territory, but we stood
together: my nephew and I – and the heron at the edge

of sight. Then he flew again. His wings carried us,
their movement like the undulations of our losses.

*

Johanna Caton is a Benedictine nun of Minster Abbey in Kent, England. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and reviews, including Ekphrastic Review, Leaping Clear, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Amethyst Review, St Katherine Review, The Catholic Poetry Room, The Christian Century.