Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, BLUE HERON, by MARY BRENT WHITESIDE


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

BLUE HERON, by                    
First Line: Once in the evening it was there
Last Line: The mystic heron vanished -- where?
Subject(s): Herons; Nature


Once in the evening it was there,
And at the reedy margin of the lake,
Its wild blue note against the silver air,
Flowed out like music, when spent intervals of silence break
With unclaimed legacies of song --
A long, long note as night and stars are long.

The hours blow outward like a chime of bells, but fall
In shadows not in cadences.
They wrap the dusk about them for a shawl,
And where its fringes tangle in the trees,

The pines reach upward out of silence into speech;
Into a muffled requiem reach and reach,
Above a thin, advancing mist, that drops
Downward in whirling phantom shapes, and stops
With one protesting shiver, where it yields
To a long flow, like moonlit water through the fields.
And then the nearer world becomes a blot,
And thing spring into being that are not.

Dark wings swirl eerily, and cries
Out of the unlit silence, rise and rise.
The wet fern has a sudden poignance, sharp and thin,
As if hands struck an untuned violin,
And in chilled water to their knees,
Huddle the uncomplaining cypresses.
In one blue note against the darkening air,
The mystic heron vanished -- where?





Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net