Winter Herons
Theirs is a fairy tale gray,
a shade from a language
cupped and delivered
in sermons from the birch
and hazel--every noun, verb
and adjective caught in the stray
mouths of chaffinches, bramblings
and robins. Animal tracks capture
the message in their pictograms,
the repeating survive, survive, survive
blinking through the snowdrops’ glassy lamps, the drone dances of winter gnats,
caught in the cow parsley’s frozen
umbrellas as intricate as a snowflake’s
unbreakable cipher, and the song sheet
of a fox’s frost-gnawed fur.
Author: Christian Ward
0 Comments