Still Being
Heron in the Botanics
I love your oneness with a restless world,
your contentment with a proferred habitat:
embodied concentration, each synapse static,
while I barely linger long enough to focus.
Today you seek the susurrus of stillness:
the Chinese Garden with its seemly pond.
You don’t do scruffy chic or informality:
each feather knows its place. Even this
artic draught can’t undo your poise,
your studied nonchalance, the grace in
your reflected image, a hunched perfection,
stuff of metaphor. When, with a coyness,
a moorhen dips her red dab in the pool,
twitches and birls, you still steadfastly
refuse to blink; still gaze into a quandary
of reeds, a contemplation of bamboo.
The ducks spook you. Like me, you move off,
gingering your way as if hidden landmines lay
in your path; each tiptoe hazarding dismay,
each step a testing of tentative truth.
Christine De Luca, a former Edinburgh Makar, writes in both English and Shetlandic.
[Published in The Evergreen Vol. I]
