This week’s poem, Leslie Moore’s “Herons,” invites us into the exquisitely honed consciousness of a great blue. I love this poem’s Zen-like simplicity, and the hypnotic clarity of these birds’ perception in the marsh.

Moore is the author/artist of “What Rough Beasts: Poetry/Prints” (Littoral Books, 2021). She won a Maine Literary Award for short nonfiction in 2018, and she has published poems and essays in English Journal, Take Heart, The Maine Review, The Catch, The Café Review and elsewhere.

Herons
By Leslie Moore

Four great blues meditate
on mudflats—spar-straight,
stock-still—and I am one of them.

How silent we are
in our low-tide reveries,
gazes both inward and out.

How we sense the ooze
gurgle between toes, water
lap legs, air shift feathers.

How precise
our discernment of glints
in briny shallows.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Herons,” copyright 2022 by Leslie Moore, was previously published in Tellus Journal. It appears by permission of the author.