Why Heron Is Blue

Diane Sautter

Why Heron Is Blue

Anyone will tell you he looks gray.
Gray like water, gray like sand.
Gray is heron’s cloak.
Gray is heron’s hand.

So what’s with all the blue?
Ah, when you wear the grayest of gray,
a certain cast comes over you.
It all has to do with getting your prey.

When you’re successful and say nothing,
something about you looks blue.
You are hidden and knowing.
Blue’s what you are when you're true.

Near my foot I found it,
a heron feather.
It was gray there on the ground.
Held aloft, it flashed resplendent.

Blue as a guiding light,
blue as the beckoning sky,
blue as the possibility of flight,
blue as the innermost eye.

Heron is blue to himself
or herself. The observer will be deceived.
Heron is blue as they say so was Krishna,
impossibly blue.

Blue must be believed.

ISBN 1-59661-048-4
53 pages/$15

Diane Sautter with a painter’s eye sees two mallards as “feathered corks…swimlessly riding.” An unexpected event, like a power outage, becomes lyrical, the sudden dark like “the descent of some giant eyelid.” Take her chapbook, reader, and wander with it across the earth. Muse upon Freud, who liked “the way the dark humus earth” spongily thudded under his feet. These are poems for dreamers and thinkers.
Russell Thorburn, poet and educator

Diane Sautter’s Why Heron Is Blue astonishes as it unveils in each spare and musical composition moments of pure wonder at the world’s beauty and complexity. This collection forced me fully awake, as if I were downwind of everything essential, and alert to it in ways I hadn’t quite experienced previous to reading this wonderful book. Poignant, honest, tough and tender-hearted, I found myself suddenly redefining the ecstatic, and my need, once again, to share in all of it.
Jack Driscoll, poet and author of the novel How Like An Angel