I am the heron
standing in the shallows
of a man-made lake,
balanced on bamboo legs,
feet splayed firmly
on a precarious bed of eroded stones.
Focused on the water,
waiting so intently for a sweet-fleshed fish
that I do not heed the humans
gawking on the bank.
Beneath the shimmering surface
just a flicker of racing shadow.
Plunge toward it, beak open…
Sudden displacement of water
stirs up a silty murk
yet cannot obscure the vision
of my future.
Great Blue
Filed under poetry
Ruth Hull Chatlien 
Huh. Nice. I’m curious. What inspired you to write a poem about a heron?
I don’t think we have herons here but we have enormous cranes.
I saw a great blue heron acting very much like this at the Chicago Botanic Garden–hunting fish in the lagoon where the three-island Japanese garden is. Lots of people on the paths had stopped to watch it. But I felt sort of a split consciousness. As a writer, I also identified with the bird and its pursuit of something only it could see, something it knew it had to have.