The Guiding Heron

[Odysseus and Diomedes on a night-spying expedition to the Trojan camp]

“Athena winged a heron close to their path
and veering right. Neither man could see it,
scanning the dark night they only heard its cry”
(Iliad , Book 10)

So the voice of the goddess comes in the night
unearthly as if far away, but close;
echoing through the unfathomable dark, but whispered

as if a lover told a secret close to your ear
and you reply just as softly yet speaking clearly:
‘O goddess I answer your call’

into the darkness of the night, no light,
even starlight (fitful behind cloud) and not
moonlight for it is moondark, so dark

the voice, the heron’s call in the night:
a creak, a croak, a fraink, not sweet
like a songbird but a guiding sign to be wary

a waymark on the path, showing the track
to be taken, the line to follow through the gloom,
impenetrable blackness unimaginable in towns, villages

even where some distant gleam lightens the hue
of darkness, but out here in the ancient dark
her piercing cry is the only glint to guide you

coldly calling from empty space, but welcome
as the sigh of a mother to a feeding child, nurturing
sharp-eared attention, opening your night eyes.

Soul Light

Out on the bog the heron's wingbeat
Fractures the waters below disturbing
It's mirror image so that I know
That life transcends death, though

The reflection is no longer there
As the bird lifts away from water
Into air, its other element but one
Where its soul life is clouded

As the sky is as if empty unlike
The otherness of water which contains
An other self and depths that swirl
Beneath the glitter of sunlight, soul light

Within the pond's absorption of the
Spectrum of the rainbow so that
Only a clear greyness shimmers
In the wind's fanning of quiescent fire.

Geese on the Mawddach

There were eight or nine of them honking in the way geese do and they turned, as one, then glided down onto the sandbank in the middle of the river and settled there. Watching them, and the water swirling around the bank, I attuned myself to the flow below the slopes of the hills in muted February shades of russet, yellow-green and brown. Above, the grey rock was streaked with remnant snow. My attention was drawn back to the river as a heron moved across my field of vision following the flow downstream to the estuary, beating the air slowly with heavy wings. Meanwhile the geese spread out across the bank which had been exposed by the retreating tide.

A light shower of fine rain passed and was gone in minutes. Cloud drifted low in the sky with barely a gap for the weak sunshine to filter through. The white bark of some birch trees, fissured with black incisions, caught the light and I stared at the trees intently as a sequence of sharp sense impressions, each distinct, clear, and bright, though simultaneously forming a blur of consciousness, filled the day with visionary perceptions of such subtlety that they seemed almost ordinary.

The geese remained on the sandbank which was growing as the water level fell. There were some oyster-catchers there too by now. Time passed yet did not pass. Still, un-moving as a heron, I watched from my vantage point above the shore as the river ran down to the sea.