Night Herons
        after "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver

You cannot be coaxed to be indifferent.
You cannot be coaxed to drift through your senescence
for three decades on a lawn dreaming.
You can be coaxed only to notice the light silk of your breath
caress what it caresses.
Teach me with desire, yours, and I will offer you mine.
Anyway the marsh stretches out.
Anyway the dusk and the clumsy thumbs of the wind
are fumbling over the waterways,
through the meadows and the bayberry,
the goldenrod and the reeds.
Anyway the night herons, snug in the shadowy sheltered rookery,
are clambering upwards again.
Wherever we are, no matter how distant,
the herons return themselves to our memory,
call to us like the cradled mourning, patient and ready —
over and over turning our pages
in the album of seasons.

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Copyright © 2017 Miriam N. Kotzin All rights reserved
from Debris Field
David Robert Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission