Great Blue Heron Rookery -- National Poetry Month/Earth Day Installment 2

Bath Road Great Blue Heron Rookery

We have been making regular pilgrimage to the Great Blue Heron Rookery on Bath Road on the edge of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. I think of herons as primarily solitary but they seem to gather together for courtship, egg-laying and raising the young.  There are over 50 active nests in the three or four most populated trees. The males bring offerings of sticks to the woo the females and to demonstrate their homemaking (nestmaking?) abilities. They do a little tug of war over the stick and then she puts it in the nest (you can watch a nesting pair on the Cornell Ornithology Heron-cam).


Here is a fine Great Blue Heron poem by Carolyn Kizer:
The Great Blue Heron
BY CAROLYN KIZER

M.A.K. September, 1880-September, 1955

As I wandered on the beach

I saw the heron standing   

Sunk in the tattered wings

He wore as a hunchback’s coat.   

Shadow without a shadow,   

Hung on invisible wires   

From the top of a canvas day,   

What scissors cut him out?   

Superimposed on a poster   

Of summer by the strand   

Of a long-decayed resort,   

Poised in the dusty light   

Some fifteen summers ago;   

I wondered, an empty child,   

“Heron, whose ghost are you?”

I stood on the beach alone,

In the sudden chill of the burned.

My thought raced up the path.   

Pursuing it, I ran

To my mother in the house

And led her to the scene.

The spectral bird was gone.

But her quick eye saw him drifting   

Over the highest pines

On vast, unmoving wings.

Could they be those ashen things,   

So grounded, unwieldy, ragged,   

A pair of broken arms

That were not made for flight?   

In the middle of my loss

I realized she knew:

My mother knew what he was.

O great blue heron, now

That the summer house has burned   

So many rockets ago,

So many smokes and fires

And beach-lights and water-glow   

Reflecting pinwheel and flare:   

The old logs hauled away,   

The pines and driftwood cleared   

From that bare strip of shore   

Where dozens of children play;   

Now there is only you

Heavy upon my eye.

Why have you followed me here,   

Heavy and far away?

You have stood there patiently   

For fifteen summers and snows,   

Denser than my repose,

Bleaker than any dream,

Waiting upon the day

When, like grey smoke, a vapor   

Floating into the sky,

A handful of paper ashes,

My mother would drift away.

Carolyn Kizer, “The Great Blue Heron” from Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000. Copyright © 2001 by Carolyn Kizer. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P. O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: Poetry (April 1958).