The Heron and the Sea

The Heron and the Sea

The heron and the fury of the raging sea

And the sky overcast with a neutral grey,

Made the image of the frail bird stay

The whole of that foggy and windy day.

Much was being flung at the frail bird

In a celestial wrath

At the heron in the tempest of a hostile wind.

I saw the waves lashing against the craggy shores,

And the heron, an image of stillness sculpted in ice,

Standing on a rock with drooping wings and a sunken beak,

A forlorn image, a solitary thing,

Watching its fate being written

On the waves and being washed away

Before the scroll could be held and read.

The heron in that moment was closest

To the truth of my being:

Both humbled by the severe wave

When the tide is high and the wind is shrill,

Both struck by the brutality of the silent doom

Of hunger when the hunger is for what they do not need,

Having lost the taste for what the ocean brings

And hurls at their feet indifferently;

A hunger that needs the cleverness of tongue to justify what the soul needs.

The difference is that for the heron

The hunger of its flesh and bones

Is still the need of the body’s vital wind,

While I, the human, gone far beyond

The limits of what once was a forgotten creed,

But now a devastating need

Of my spirit, and the begetting of a seed

For a hunger for more,

A hunger for what my pragmatic self says I do not need—

An encounter with a heron standing in the wind

Has brought my myth

Into a sudden light of the ancient shores

Where I must have lived and died.

The heron freezes, and it will live;

I will survive

Only to die in a loss of wing.