A seagull and anhinga sit
On logs next to the pier,
Perhaps preparing for a meal,
For fish are likely here.
They do a little grooming, but
They mostly seem to sit,
Though the anhinga opens up
His mouth a little bit.
As far as the anhinga goes,
I think that’s what it is.
My Google research said so;
I am not a birding whiz.
The seagull just flapped up and flew
And left his friend behind,
Although it doesn’t seem that the
Anhinga seems to mind.
It’s lovely sitting by the water,
Which a barge just churned
And, by the way, that seagull,
Just this minute, has returned.
Categories:
anhinga, bird, river,
Form: Rhyme
Nets are hauled and homeward go the shrimp boats
rolling slow and easy on a sunset path,
their droning engines chugging
over a rippling seafoam.
In the mangrove swamp
an egret sets its white sails and glides upwards
upon hot winds.
The sky opens for its passage
leading it through a cloudless window.
Cypress roots grip the darkening water.
their knees just above a brackish deep.
Mosquitoes dance in the dank
as shadows reach inwards.
Tonight on the bayou, grills will be heated,
pots filled,
while fishing nets are neatly reefed and mended
by rough and ready hands.
Children will skip and play in the barefooted
calm of late evening,
until carried away to their cots
sleepily listening to anhinga and loon
chant their native calls
beneath a far from sleeping lakeside moon.
Categories:
anhinga, poetry,
Form: Free verse
A skinny black girl, her torso submerged,
long neck holding her head up like a swimming Anhinga.
I should not know what a ‘snakebird’ is --- I am eleven years old
and have lived in the same dirty part of London all my life.
Florida is a missing piece in a school jigsaw,
while the British Empire is a scummy quarry basin pond
behind a brick factory.
My body feels rasped by cosmic sluice gates.
I could tell the girl wonderful things,
but my skull is an open hatch
jettisoning the rest of my life.
Small boys call to me in a trilling tongue,
a pictorial language made from sticks and stones.
Their faces familiar but their names
long drowned by decades.
I am recalling, falling through a time circle
in a rippling pond.
Anhinga-girl circles around,
eyes wide, waiting for me to say something.
I don't know how to speak to children from other places.
I gulp water and splutter from a faraway memory.
She grins and frog-legs away.
Categories:
anhinga, poetry,
Form: Free verse
Dusk wades in.
Anhinga necks stir shadows.
A humid nightfall laps Cypress knee’s.
where unseen eddy’s bubble and swirl.
Florida evaporates at its lakeshores
where nocturnal-fevers simmer.
We are locked into the chaffing songs
of crickets, the drilling buzz of mosquitoes,
as cypress roots soak in a swampy drench.
Egrets will rise before the dawn
to watch the dark waters
beneath the hang of Spanish moss
light waits, disguised still
as a glint in the eyes of frogs.
Categories:
anhinga, poetry,
Form: Free verse
Here in my suburban acre of Ohio;
I feel the generations,
the hungarians, the irish and germans,
the dutch, the blacks, the shawnee.
We are not a melting pot,
we are birds and critters brought here
by wild, wild winds.
I am a grackle
with my own grackle language,
I expect you who live in the same tree with me
have your own way
of making a home in this land.
Heartland is the root we share,
The root is lazy days in PJ’s.
Hectic mini-van school runs,
sweats for Walmart and yelling at stuff.
One dress tie for special occasions.
Most of us are not poor or rich,
Most of us about nothing much.
We don’t love our guns,
we simply keep them
in case those who don’t understand
want to mess with what we’ve earned.
My neighbor is a mourning dove,
Her son is a possum that loves to play
video games from dawn to dusk.
My pal is a rooster, a gnarly-handed poet,
don’t ask him to write anything
he might think those fighting words.
I like being a grackle, but I married an anhinga
from Florida.
She is adjusting.
Categories:
anhinga, poetry,
Form: Free verse
The sun will rise like a golden fish
over the far bank,
but for now
a cobwebbed sky
clings to the curling water.
This is the margin
where dawn issues
through nights last gleams
its first ghostly drifts.
The dewy day is ushered outwards,
a veiled lace flecked with gold.
Reeds rustle, stir a dark mud
into green ripples.
Dragonflies climb stems
to temper damp wings.
A standing heron appears,
its eyes are star-bright.
Anhinga and coots,
pluck mist from their plumage.
The day floods up
to paint itself
beneath high flying feathers
the hunter waits, gun at the ready,
but he will miss
for the margin has hidden his aim
amid glittering shadows.
Categories:
anhinga, poetry,
Form: Free verse
Cypress ‘knee's’ lap in the light
as dusk wades in.
Evening parachutes down,
it plants shallow pother
around ankle-deep trunks.
Anhinga necks stir shadows
under a low moon.
This is the gurgling gills
of a melting evening.
Florida ends at every lakeshore
where night-fevers begin.
A heated gloom that thickens
where bugs quicken.
We are locked into the chaffing songs
of crickets,
the drilling buzz of mosquitoes,
as cypress roots soak
in the dark dank air.
Categories:
anhinga, poetry,
Form: Free verse
I'm de-boned, on my back, sun-dazed,
green water slipping under ribs.
I circle a mandala of light behind my eyes.
Pals slip through rings of sparkling sunshine.
Pale limbs dive through slowly spinning water
while time sloshes back and forth.
A skinny black girl, her torso submerged,
long neck holding her head up
like a swimming Anhinga.
A chubby white boy gulping the sky
as he doggy-paddles around me.
My body feels tugged by cosmic sluice gates.
I could tell the girl how wonderful she is
but my skull is an open hatch.
I could befriend the boy for life,
but we inhabit rival schools in a ferocious town,
and my skull is an open hatch,
For years they were reflections in my eye,
now my mind struggles to float there -
it sinks too deep in a far distant pond.
Categories:
anhinga, poetry,
Form: Blank verse
Here in my rented acre of Ohio;
I feel the generations,
the hungarians, the irish and germans,
the dutch, the blacks, the shawnee.
We are not a melting pot,
we are birds and critters brought here
by wild, wild winds.
I am a grackle
with my own grackle language,
I expect you who live in the same tree with me
have your own way
of making a home in this land.
Heartland is the root we share,
The root is lazy days in PJ’s.
Hectic mini-van school runs,
sweats for Walmart and yelling at stuff.
One or two ties for special occasions.
Most of us are not so poor or not so rich.
We don’t love our guns,
we simply keep them in good order
in case those who don’t understand
want to mess with what we have earned.
My neighbor is a mourning dove,
Her son is a possum that loves to play
video games from dawn to dusk.
My pal is a rooster, a gnarly-handed poet,
don’t ask him to write anything
he might think those fighting words.
I like being a grackle, but I married an anhinga
from Florida.
She is adjusting.
Categories:
anhinga, poetry,
Form: Blank verse
Anhinga Intake
Snake-like neck, fish slithering through it-
© Dane Ann Smith-Johnsen
February 14, 2010
Poetic form: Monuku
Categories:
anhinga, animals, nature
Form: Monoku