Oblivion’s Heron
You do not guard the gate. You are the gate.
The tracks you leave on sand
are runes that wash away.
Whoever crosses you will not cross over.
You vanish in your stillness. A recluse curls
in a repurposed shell.
A toad is breathing song.
Long-legged like someone’s daughter, you withhold
the sharp spear of your bill—
Great Blue, gray-blue,
you could extend huge wings
(angelic, terrible)
but don’t. Instead, moon-yellow eyes alert,
you wait, tilting your clear gaze from the glare
against the gleaming water,
the better to see what trails
below in useless armor, scattering...
Why is it we feel useless—small, unseen?
Your bright beak opens slightly
as if to pose a question
you’d never let us near enough to answer.
Memory and the Hive
“Telling the bees” is the beekeepers’ practice
of informing the colony of major life events.
Not doing so risks disaster for the hive.
—Folk belief
The hive, after a death, does not go silent—
The cycle of its labors never ends.
Yet we must “tell the bees,” a mourning cloth
laid on the hive, its darkness not so dark
that light’s extinguished, nor our human grief
so deep that it resists all consolation.
Heads bowed, our voices low, we break the news
as if our grim misfortune is their own.
By now they’ve learned to recognize our faces
hazed by netting, gloved hands reaching through.
What do they hear, exactly, when we speak?
Our voices boom far off, like harmless thunder.
Each has her place: relentless foragers
who hunt for nectar sunup to sundown;
the gravid queen who checks each hexagon
for larvae deep in metamorphosis;
nurse bees who serve and feed them as they grow;
the mortuary bees who clear the dead.
What have we told them that they didn’t know?
The hum gets louder. Soon, they settle down.
The gift of gathered nectar, bee to bee
(reduced to honey as it’s passed along)
nourishes all. The fanning of small wings
inside the hive is delicate, angelic.
Such diligence brings solace.... But in the dark,
the hive’s hum soothing, some skilled forager
will seize the stage, the sun still on her mind,
to share the best route to her choicest troves,
conveyed by dance moves and the slant of light
she mimics in the waggles of her steps.
Is there a dance to signify the sad news
of our human world? The mourning cloth
laid on the hive is not so dark as night
when flowers shimmer brightly in the minds
of bees who dance, remembering their travels
—The gift of gathered memory, bee to bee.
Metaphors for Tymbal Music
Tymbals are the abdominal membranes that allow male cicadas to “sing.”
The banging of ten billion tambourines
What does it mean
Infinite shriek careening past a storm
What’s taking form
Ten thousand theremins make their escape
By changing shape
Waves booming, multi-tracked to the extreme
A lucid dream
Medieval chant uncertain of its pitch
Wavering, rich
Light aircraft engines idling over Rome
We’re almost home
The rattling of the D train far away
We cannot stay
An endless agonizing car alarm
The cause of harm
Foo fighters glimpsed by pilots lost in time
History rhymes
Six billion laptop coolers churning dread
How many dead
That same old treetop shriek across ten miles
Despite denials
A missile’s everlasting flight before
A call to war
In silent rooms, the pulsing of our blood
It does no good
An alien spacecraft’s hum & hovering
Discovering
The drone that drops deliveries from its claw
Nobody saw
All reasons that we hear or cannot hear
What’s drawing near
The gorgeous music that will leave us deaf
Praise what is left
Hatchling
I still remember how the bird spilled out
that summer day
we broke its egg to show the way
into a world we knew nothing about.
Except the bird was not a bird—not yet.
The pale blue shell
we’d cracked was not a prison cell
but all the sanctuary it would get.
That poor, ill-fated, half-formed embryo
sun-struck, lay drenched
in amniotic gold, the bench
on which it quavered all that it would know
of gravity and light: naked and blind,
more terrifying
because it was so quickly dying.
We were too young to know what we would find—
I’d imagined glossy wings, bright beak,
clear eyes that shone
with gratitude and met my own,
not some huge-headed creature, pale and weak.
I doubt you still remember how I climbed
a garden chair
to reach up to a bird’s nest near
enough to grasp, a bad plan poorly timed.
I’d introduced an uninvited guest:
the possibility
joy could turn to tragedy—
a shattered egg, an empty, ruined nest.
Did words like sorry stick inside my throat?
For what I’d done,
I ran as fast as I could run—
Another wrong for which amends are owed.
Jaguar Sun
The Jaguar Sun, a fire in the east,
ascends in radiance, descends at dusk,
and prowls beneath the pale horizon line
that meets the stars. Dark lords we do not see
are no match for his light. How warily
he watches while his adversaries feast
in Xibalba’s halls, immortal lives at risk
—How silently he takes them, one by one.
And then, it’s day again: the dawn’s pink light,
blood-tinged, returns. The Jaguar Sun is bright,
for now; the lords, forgotten in their hold,
must bide their time. Perhaps a brief eclipse,
one day, will warn of an apocalypse—
Till then, the sun’s more blinding than pure gold.
Ned Balbo's newest books are The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (New Criterion Poetry Prize), and 3 Nights of the Perseids (Richard Wilbur Award) whose title poem appears in the recent Cambridge University Press anthology Outer Space: 100 Poems. His third book, The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems, received the Donald Justice Prize and the 2012 Poets’ Prize. A former faculty member in Iowa State University's MFA program in creative writing and environment, he has received grants or fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (translation) and the Maryland Arts Council. Recent poems appear in The Common, Ecotone, Gingko Prize 2019 Ecopoetry Anthology, Plough Quarterly, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. He is married to poet Jane Satterfield.