September 22, 2010

Ripples of the Great Blue Heron

Five years ago today, on a day I had taken as a vacation day, which turned out to be the day before I was laid off from a company I had worked 18 years, I saw a Great Blue Heron standing on a rock in the middle of a pond in Maudslay Park.

I watched its great wings rise slowly and magnificently as it flew away. There is quite the transformation when that particular shore bird takes off. Its tremendously long legs seem to disappear and wide wings magically appear instead. I was mesmerized. But what I felt cannot really be written in words. It was a mystical experience, with workaday prophecies and spiritual intuition, that still reverberates to this day.

I went for a walk in that same park today, in honor of that mysterious bird and mystic day, and wrote this poem tweet by tweet as I walked a similar path I took five years ago. I had no idea where the poem would go, but after its few miles, here it is (with just a few punctuation revisions):

The Ripples of the Great Blue Heron

begin again at the bright green light of outside seeing in.

in the meadow of no name, the blue jay breeze of empty words will fly away with future forests and the past of trees.

in the woods of Ra, ten thousand yellow leaves are playing in the shadow webs of ash and flesh of fast graffiti.

in the orchard of old maple trees, the sugar color of the summer turns to paradisiacal sweet nothings.

the acorn road is filled with dead oak leaves and living horse shit.

but the mushroom swamp is dry with nothing but the mud of who am i

two roads diverged in an eastern wood but Robert Frost doesn't live here any longer.

the dark hill rises by itself until it turns into a shining tower.

the silver grove of arms and eyes is always fun and ever free in purple asters and the sitting thought of me.

hark! but something concrete this way comes.

below the bank, the river of a million mills is making something new today.

in the great white pines of absolute eagles, the sun is like a shadow on the ground.

not a sound, not a sound, not a sound.

the material is immaterial: so says the ripples of the Great Blue Heron.

~@sonrivers 2010

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you....

son rivers said...

you're welcome