Artwork by Nicholas Walton-Healy
Where i live, herons are rare, the blue ones more so
and i have never seen two herons, always one.
It is coming to me now that i do not expect to see them
the way that i assume that blackbirds, finches, doves
come with the day. Instead, always when i am in the middle
of an ordinary action, a commonplace, about to cross a road
or in the kitchen, just as i’ve closed the fridge and turned
around maybe to go back to a half-empty plate, still warm,
there, within the kitchen doorway frame of the familiar scene
[weathered bannisters, luffed mango leaves, my farmer neighbour’s patch] a shimmering                       not so much appearing as seeming to have been always there.A gleaming wanting to withhold itself and almost doing that, almost
slipping back into the green, unnoticed but for the shift of light,
the shy, slight displacement of the tall grass by a greener, evanescent iridescence.
Another thought comes now, or perhaps now noticed: i have never heard a heron
call, squawk, warble, trill, make a slight, small sound
of any kind; so that i’m wondering, intrigued, half-seriously:
Do they? No? Yes, but not within the limitings of human presence?
And, half-fancifully, another thought: that it withholds its voice
because it knows its utterance would be lost in my translation
and what it comes to say, if i could hear, would change my life.
It’s whimsical, all this, i know — a poet juggling images. Then
a blur of pale blue flash-crosses underneath my eyelids,
a suddening of memory: an olive-green river knuckled with rocks,
a track, crisp underfoot, only half-following the bank,
the drip of sunlight among branches, coppery tints in the low grass,
and at the river’s edge, the sheer, rare blue unbelievability of it —
a blue heron in the moment before flight, tilted against time and its surrounding space,
standing in the flow of water — gripping soft, shifting earth — wings flexing air,
then a blue flare exploding silently, a brief blink of sky just over water,
and in the oblique space left — light.
Years … before that glimpse brightened into a wordless utterance of realization.
Years … the self-abrading friction of striking sparks to light, burn, fuse feeling-intellect-sensation
into the briefest incandescence of rare triune being; a living of that moment, more than world’s worth,
when a blue heron, a paraclete, aligns for ascension, though still at home in water-air-earth.
~ Kendel Hippolyte
Kendel Hippolyte (St. Lucia) is one of the Caribbean’s foremost poets and playwrights. His latest publication is ‘Fault Lines’ (Peepal Tree Press, 2012) which won the prestigious Bocas Literary Festival Poetry Prize in 2013.
