No room in a heron's beak

by Alisha Brown

There is no room in a heron’s beak
for blame, 
just
the slow, tender gulp of a fish 
down the gullet

See how he stands,
still as an icicle,
dripping little droplets that 
break 
the rippling pool
of his body’s dim mirage on the lake

When the swans come,
they bow their heads

Drawn, like all things,
to hunger and violence

Knowing, like all things,
that beauty breathes heaviest
in the brief, lean space
between lifefulness
and after

The heron 
seems to float above himself 
for a moment, eyes 
locked on the marsh, 
backward legs and feather-tufted chest
strung tight toward his unseen target, and when he
darts
his executioner’s strike,
spiring the perch
cleanly and plainly,
he carries the flickering wet body,
the silver-wet body
to the bank
where he drops it, lets it rest awhile,
emptying its share of the unknowable into the sun
before it is swallowed

Alisha Brown is a poet and traveler born on Kamilaroi land in Australia. She won the 2022 Joyce Parkes Women’s Writing Prize and placed second in the Judith Rodriguez Open Section of the 2021 Woorilla Poetry Prize. You can find her work in Westerly, Griffith Review, and the Australian Poetry Anthology, among others.