Herons in Reeds, by Penelope Moffet

Herons in Reeds, by Ashi Ni Sagi (Japan). 1926.

Herons In Reeds
                                                
Coiled beauty
of the long necks pulled in,
stilt legs like reeds
in the rippled water, reeds
like ghosts
rising silhouetted toward
a sickle moon.
Symbol of steadfast love,
twinned herons
on the album that holds
my wedding pictures.
But all I can think about
this morning
is the braggadocio
of the men
I knew in youth,
all those couplings
and uncouplings.

Penelope Moffet
​
Penelope Moffet lives in Southern California. Her second chapbook, It Isn't That They Mean to Kill You, has just been published by Arroyo Seco Press. During August 2018 she participated in the August Poetry Postcard Festival, an international convocation of postcard-writing strangers, in the course of which she wrote 44 poems, most of them ekphrastic.