Heron – a draft

We aren't much to look at, we poets, 
unless you look very closely, 
which most aren't wont to do.

It's not that they don't get us.
They just don't have time for us, missing 
the chance to see the blue feathered 

heron, one pencil-lead leg fixed
in the sludge of the runoff in the morning. 
The other is raised in a mist so opaque, 

you can't blame them for hardly seeing it. 
To anyone unknowing of creatures like herons, 
it would seem it were lacking a limb -

poor amputee in a world where most everything
with power comes in twos. Or more. 
Imagine them, then, seeing the bird on one leg

slicing the pool into ripples. Then dipping and raising
its dinosaur head, coming back with a carp, 
throat stretched wider than logically possible

with something still very much alive.
So it can remain alive. At least a little longer.
We poets. We aren't much to look at. Are we? 

-Katherine Gotthardt