Heron Dance

Working and living in the middle of the city creates a longing for deeper connections to nature and mystery and life, simple life. Several years ago I discovered a great publication and website, Heron Dance. The little journal combines poetry, prose, and painting in an extremely satisfying manner. I urge you to check it out at www.herondance.org.

Being Still

She's a quiet clapper in the bell of the prairie,
a girl who likes to be alone.
Today, she's hiked four miles
down ravines' low cool blueness.
Bending under a barbed wire, she's in grass fields.
She's at the edge of the great plains.
Wise to openness, she finds it a similar place.
Her clothes swell like wheat bread.

When she returns to her parents' house,
the foxtails and burrs have come home, too.
The plants seem intent on living in new ground.
She's the carrier. Carrier is a precision
learned in summer's biology class.
She likes to think of ripening seeds,
a cargo inside the bellies of flying birds.
Birds like red-winged blackbirds who skim the air
and land, alert on their cattail stalks.

They allow her a silent manner.
They go about their red-winged businessof
crying to each other, dipping their beaks
into the swampy stand of ditch water,
full of the phantom of green.
The stiller she is, the more everything moves
in the immense vocabulary of being.

- Margaret Hasse, from the book Stars Above, Stars Below published by New Rivers Press (From Issue 24 of the Heron Dance journal)