Two Poems by Sheryl White

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Night Heron

Dark, hunched, a closed palm
of a bird, feet knotted, tight
to the limb, over 

a moss swale, algae-
soft with light caress, green 
with liquid dusk. An aged 

willow’s bole shades 
the bird’s thick-fisted husk, leans 
to its shadow. I see 

in my eyes, eyes
in the black bandit cap of it, 
slick feathers on bone.

We are not one, too
many years from that wing 
to my armed flight.

 

Flight

As in to be over
or get over, to be above
to leave above, to soar
when we reach hollow
when we are the distance
covered, swift, passing
by the use of wings, to rise
to flee, to leave en masse
to see below, as in to be
high and flying or low 
to step, to skim, to run
away. These are the stairs
the climb up to and 
stepping off of, then, later 
or at once, in the instance
unrestrained and hoping
what we left behind
below will not follow.

Author’s Note: Night Heron grew out of my fascination with this bird, that I have often seen along waterways. Once, in a visit to the house where I grew up (and my parents continued to live), I noticed a night heron in the swale below their home. It has a somewhat prehistoric appearance when it sits resting, and that shape fascinated me. It's appearance near my coming-of-age home, where my parents now had become elderly, was particularly poignant--the idea of age, its relation to us, and our attempted flight away. 

Although I originally wrote Flight as an exercise, I read it to my dearest friend as she lay dying. She asked me to read her one of my poems, and Flight was the right one. Now, I always associate the poem with her and her spirit, not really her leaving me, but leaving behind her pain and moving beyond the needs of earth.

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Sheryl White is an artist and writer living in Boston. Her writing has been published in Blast Furnace, Solstice Literary Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, The Boston Globe, Split Rock Review, Gravel, The Woven Tale Press Journal, and The Comstock Review, among others. Her chapbook, “Sky gone”, will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2020. In 2016, she received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Finalist Grant and was selected in 2016 and 2017 for the Mayor of Boston Poetry Program.