Bridging

Heron?

"Could you send me your heron poem please?"
text from Ursula's mother, Delia,
putting together some birthday bird book
(Urshie's 21st) - pics and themed pieces.

That, late last night - too late to stir myself.
Well, sunny day - so, Joy finishing up
home-work shift , out we went in long dapple
to the Flora and Fauna Park, again.

The lake's aglitter through the spiky reeds
and white seeds blow from bulrushes, drifting
among the long-legged shadows where tall
swamp-hens tread tentatively neat-trimmed lawn

like thin blue-suited spinsters in a church,
while from covert by lake's edge, commotion!
Two males squabbling, screech blue murder
as if a cat had them choking their last.

Well, the breeze blowing dazzle so astir
we toddled off to look out from the bridge
at pelicans and egrets nodding off
on island trees and shallows nearly drowned

by inflow of waters from over-nighting  rains;
when, "Look over your left shoulder, Peter."
and there a young heron, clambering bank,
awkwardly foot hauled, no wing assistance

but a strange asymmetric shudder. Oh.
"I think it's damaged a wing."
                                                       "Maybe not,"
Joy hoped, "Just sunning itself on the bank.
"Well, it's bold then, for a juvenile grey."

They don't let you get double that distance.
Eel affixed to bulky body it seemed,
slowly twisting its neck, left, right, up, out.
No heron, an Australian Darter!

The doubled up neck gorget fluffed out thick
and on the snaky head, stiletto beak.
We moved nearer slowly to that bridgend
where, so still-bodied, the darter squatted.

Blond eye peering gently from pipe-cleaner head
by rights grim thruster of misericorde,
yet softened, saddened, compromised, brought down,
looking out on the last of the sunset.

Joy rang the wild-life rescue and they said
they'd get a volunteer to pick it up;
but later on that evening  they confessed
not one out there had been available.

.................................

Below is the heron poem Delia remembered and asked me to send her, written in 1990.

Heron

That clumped earth, cracking and crumbling
between stalks of the beanfield, halts
windspread of rushes from the drainage ditch –
a feathery profusion of delicate rustling,
where fireweed feeds up its long pod splays.

Over bee-corridor of clover footpath strolling,
I halt too, at this stark-zoned contrast, peering
through unaccustomed constellations of herbage,
raked receptacles of sunlace translucency,
down steep, rooty banks to the dark water.

Out by the farm a single blackbird sings.
Then thrash! world-whirr of shaken rushes;
in three pumping wingbeats levered into air,
the angular wonder of the heron at my level!
One dry bead of her glance, a shock-draught!

Before I can uncraze the glaze of my stare
at swirled air, quiet the vision-troubled aftermath
to reed-whispers, she is far over the barley field
sailing a dwindling shade, shrouding to seclusion:
and I expel the breath I did not know I'd taken.

............