Marshland Songs

I see her sometimes,
stepping through marshland
on slender, twig-like legs.
She spreads her wings, pewter-grey
against the rising sun,

the daughter she once loved
reflected upside down
within her eyes.

She is more heron than woman, now.
I watch her strike and catch
a frog between the reeds.
It glows emerald in the blaze.
In my mother’s eyes,
the image of me darkens,
fades.

I was nine when Mother found
her feathers in the metal box
where Father kept his tackle
and extra fishing line.
A cloak of woven storm clouds,
dry and mottled, choked
with ten years’ dust.
Some feathers were broken,
torn, feasted on
by wetland moths.
An ugly, haunting thing.

Mother hugged it to her chest
and in that breath, I knew:
she was never really mine
to lose.

While I slept, my mother hummed
river songs and marshland songs.
I hear them still inside my bones
at scarlet break of dawn.
But I have no wings to follow,
no marsh song of my own.

And so I stand
and let the current
rise around my feet;
I hum the songs she taught me
all those years ago.
The earth clings, sucks
at my toes, releases
with smacks of dismay
as though it cannot bear
to let me go.