Poems by Elizabeth Herron
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Extinction
for Paul Shepard
by Elizabeth Herron
Elizabeth lives in the Atascadero Creek watershed, twin to the Laguna Watershed, both tributaries to the Russian River in Sonoma County, California, where salmon spawn and where coyotes and black-tailed deer are among her closest neighbors.
Even cold erodes, and the ice
that held itself in glacial cleaving
grows eager to lie down in the sea
where the great bears will finally sleep,
sliding quietly into the depths.
Their bones roll the bottom
in layers of darkness. What is left
besides light descending
into blue shadows, the billowing
curtains of salt, the slow heft of the sea?
How can we let what is lost
settle of its own sacred weight
into the secret grief, the emptiness
we mistake for something missing
in ourselves?
© Elizabeth Herron
February Freeze
by Elizabeth Herron
One February morning we found
three dead birds in the orchard
not a mark on them, frozen in flight
migrating at night, wings
beating the dark
till they dropped like fallen stars
their bones turned to ice.
I thought of those birds again
when the Eritrean who spent
seven years seeking legal entry
to Switzerland before he stowed away
in the wheel-well of a Boeing 747
was found frozen, fallen
to an English village street.
First published in Free State Review
© Elizabeth Herron
Here Now
by Elizabeth Herron
From Canary Spring 2024
No matter the sharp clean line
of a roof against blue
between earth and sky
exploding
this bruise-able earth
keeps singing no matter --
the deep pocks
in the eastern wheat fields
no matter the empty bowl of Africa
no matter the bones of Babi Yar
and Stalin’s cold hand at the throat
the stolen wheat
stolen again --
No matter the postman with his bag of letters
scattered across the snow.
A world away
from the blood-lands
a child is walking home
with a pink backpack of books
and standing under the apple tree
the wayward reaching blossoms
of mock orange
in the quiet garden
we are safe
blessed
with this house this spring
the blood of First People
long-since soaked
into this soil. We are here now
with the rich scent of rain
and plenty of plenty.
© Elizabeth Herron
Vanishing
The grief and sense of loss we often interpret as a failure in our personality is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.
– Paul Shepard
by Elizabeth Herron
From Canary Spring 2020
Heart, lungs and gut gone to the gnaw
of insects, the intact hull of her
beached on duff, prickly
oak and pine needles, coyote scat
in the crook of her knee --
the dog sniffs a small sharp hoof
ignoring the heap of dung
red with madrone berries,
pale pits pearling through.
She noses the foreleg
where scraps of hide cling to bone.
Imagine the first flick of tail,
ripple of skin under summer flies,
and how this fawn died.
The woods are full of stories
in rotting trunks, cool shadows
and bones like these, whitened
by winters she hadn’t seen.
But what of her stays with me?
Days later in my lumpy green chair
by the window, cat curved
around my feet on the ottoman,
the dog denned under the table,
teacup on the sill, and I think
of the fox -- its narrow bloated body
on the road, a plastic bag
snagged on its foot, ballooning
beside blood slicked fur.
Will the silence of their absence rise
above the din of cities? Will their ghosts
stumble through strip malls and suburbs
looking for lost meadows, jostle
at the on-ramps, distracting drivers
with a sudden vague unease?
Will our grief surprise us?
Will we wonder at our loneliness?
© Elizabeth Herron
Who Remembers
Here is the song of the neglected yellow moon.
Jack Crimmins
by Elizabeth Herron
From Canary Fall 2014
Where are the old songs,
the ones we lost
when we forgot our earth home?
If we listen could we hear them now?
Stones beneath the hawthorn,
rounded and whaled up
amid the sea of yellow leaves.
Who remembers the songs of stones,
their river, or the sea?
From the far creek – pale alder, yellow willow,
red-stemmed dogwood in autumn color.
From the open meadow, valley oak.
Who remembers their songs?
Who are we that we have forgotten so much?
If we listen deep into the world,
would we remember?
Canada geese at dusk
fly home to the wetland
ecstatically honking.
Heart by wing, they know,
where they belong.
If we listen, what forgotten songs
would we hear? What lost wings, what
ancient stones, what open branches
would welcome us home?
© Elizabeth Herron