Still as marble.
Walks with thready blue legs.
How can they bear its weight?
Walks and freezes
in mid-step. What did you see?
All neck looking forward.
In profile, large orange beak.
Neck,
now beak,
neck,
now beak.
Silky feathers waving in the breeze.
Revealing their length,
proving it is not marble.
Neck undulates with each step,
as if balancing out the center of gravity.
A camel of the marsh.
An impossible white.
Dwarfing all the other white birds.
And then,
as if all this was not enough,
this fantastic creature
takes flight.
First appeared in Ecological Citizen, Vol 8 No 2 2025,