BLUE HERON STONE
            Polly Brown
                c. 1999
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Because I could not bring back
    the blue heron
who watched us,
    out of the river's shadows,
        and then flew heavily away--

because I could not keep
    her yellow metal eye
        to remind me of fierceness--
I kept this stone.

Blue-grey, like the heron,
    layered by millions of years in the sea,
        and rounded
    by thousands of years in the river,

it is the circling clouds of a storm;
    it is all weathers, all calm,

        all the weight that keeps you from me
and holds us to the earth.


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