In my next life
I want to come back
as a Great Blue Heron.
I will majestically
stand by a lake, capturing
fish, capturing the eye
of all who wander by,
pausing in awe and desire.
And I will have
the one thing I know
I now lack, that trait
that has escaped me
for far too many years,
patience, the ability
to stand and stare
until the moment
is right, then to act.
I am not in a hurry
for this reincarnation,
so perhaps I have more
patience than I realize.
In my dream, the world
was at peace, and I was riding
across Kansas on a unicycle, towing
my car, packed to the windows,
my dog walking alongside urging
me to speed up because she
wanted to visit South Dakota.
I am due for a tricycle, I
remind the dog, “the grave
more likely,” she responds
with a sneer that teeters between
love and spite, always precariously
balanced, as is her food bowl
on the roof of the car.
I could tell it was a dream
which is not often easy
from its midst, by the utter
lack of churches, synagogues
and mosques, none to be seen
and the Great Blue Heron
nesting in a scrub pine
on the shreds of Holy Books.
First published in EKL Review, Issue 3, 2021
https://eklreview.com/issue_3/
Walking through a nature preserve
like Wakodahatchee Wetlands you
must always keep a sharp eye.
The birds are everywhere, they are
unavoidable and even the alligators,
imagining themselves coy are
soon enough easily recognized,
snouts appear just above the surface
wary eyes scanning the shore.
Here you are also surrounded
by poems, but they are far more
able to hide, among the eggs
the wood stork carefully tends,
in the purple iridescence
of the gallinule, trailing behind
the uplifting wings of the great
blue heron as she lifts skyward,
and in the spray of feathers
the snowy egrets dangle always
drawing our eyes like a bride’s
diaphanous veil, but we, at
a loss for words in the midst
of all of this, cannot see them
awaiting us to give them flight
an old writer and his words 