Friday, February 24, 2006

Intertidal zone

On the tidal flats
a great blue heron
a slow angular
stiltwalker
picks
a careful path
between beached
orange and purple
starfish
broken mussel shells
strings of sea cucumber.

His fine tail feathers
droop grumpy and muddy,
but time for grooming later;
now there are shrimp.

He stares down intent
into a shallow clear pool
his sharp curved bill poised

suddenly piercing
water
glancefast

then raised slowly
up to the sky
chortling silently
as he swallows.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh - you must be here... :)

coyote said...

Lots and lots of intertidal flats to go 'round, on this continent, Christa. And my bird book tells me that kind of heron likes 'em all. So you can see him too, can you?

Anonymous said...

I see him everywhere, and he is beautiful.

Anonymous said...

I don't know if you intended it to be so or noticed, but stanza 3 seems to be a Haiku.

--- snip! ---

He stares down intent
into a shallow clear pool
his sharp curved bill poised

--- snip! ---

in other news - Pete finally got his electric wheelchair. is nice...for a wheelchair...

coyote said...

Hey molina; that's good news -- for a wheelchair. And yup; sometimes I play little hide-the-haiku pranks in the middles of longer pieces to amuse myself. I really lack the discipline to reduce an entire poem down to three zen-ish lines, but I still like to write 'em. Call me quirky...

Anonymous said...

follows, an entire advertising campaign reduced to '3 zen-ish lines':

mozzarella sticks
savour the breaded flavour
real Wisconsin cheese

no discipline at all involved, but as I recall it did require a few highballs. gotta go, i think i can hear a whole bunch of dead Japanese poets trying to get up...

Nessa said...

Hehehe :)