'The Great Blue Heron,' by Carolyn Kizer

M.A.K., September 1880-September 1955

As I wandered on the beach

I saw the heron standing

Sunk in the tattered wings

He wore as a hunchback’s coat.

Shadow without a shadow,

Hung on invisible wires

From the top of a canvas day,

What scissors cut him out?

Superimposed on a poster

Of summer by the strand

Of a long-decayed resort,

Poised in the dusty light

Some fifteen summers ago;

I wondered, an empty child,

“Heron, whose ghost are you?”

I stood on the beach alone,

In the sudden chill of the burned.

My thought raced up the path.

Pursuing it, I ran

To my mother in the house.

And led her to the scene.

The spectral bird was gone.

But her quick eye saw him drifting

Over the highest pines

On vast, unmoving wings.

Could they be those ashen things,

So grounded, unwieldy, ragged,

A pair of broken arms

That were not made for flight?

In the middle of my loss

I realized she knew:

My mother knew what he was.

O great blue heron, now

That the summer house has burned

So many rockets ago,

So many smokes and fires

And beach-lights and water-glow

Reflecting pinwheel and flare:

The old logs hauled away,

The pines and driftwood cleared

From that bare strip of shore

Where dozens of children play;

Now there is only you

Heavy upon my eye.

Why have you followed me here,

Heavy and far away?

You have stood there patiently

For fifteen summers and snows,

Denser than my repose,

Bleaker than any dream,

Waiting upon the day

When, like gray smoke, a vapor

Floating into the sky,

A handful of paper ashes,

My mother would drift away.

(1958)