Grace Suffices (Broadside)

I began noticing great blue herons back in the 1990s when a solitary bird overwintered in the Eno River valley in the cold winter of 1994. A fanciful vision of that bird figured in part iii. of my first published longish poem, "Eno Winter 1994." The poem appeared in Crucible in the fall of that year and won the Poet Laureate Award.
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iii. Great Blue
The heron bides on one leg stumped
the kingfisher's harangue. Exiled inland
these solitary birds shy as bats

beat their wings like dirty rugs.
Trapped by winter they stoicize:
can freeze upright and fall with a clatter.

Mired in the Eno, their bodies are baled
with log and leaf, bottle, carcass of tire
foul and indispensable.

Posted 17 July 2026. The image is from https://centurylibrary.com/collections/ and has not been generated by AI.