Winter Solstice Poem 2025: Heron, December

 

The Solstice Poem this year came from a recent encounter at Delta Ponds in Eugene.

 

Wood Duck

 

Delta Ponds is a 150-acre waterway site consisting of numerous ponds, islands and wetlands. These features were first carved out of the floodplain of the Willamette River in the 1950’s and 60’s for gravel extraction. 

 

Green-winged Teal

  

The city purchased the quarry in the 1970’s but didn’t do anything with it until 2004. Between 2004 and 2012 the city and state engaged in restoring the ponds as a side channel of the Willamette River and now there are over 155 species of birds that pass through and over 60 western pond turtles. I saw a beaver there once. Otters have recently been sighted.

 

Pied Bill Grebe

 

The ponds are sandwiched by a highway on the eastern side and a row of apartment complexes on the west, next to the river. And yet when walking around the ponds it feels like being on the edge of the wild.

 

Bufflehead

I’ve written several poems from my walks around the pond, including one related to the great blue heron nests in four or five particular trees on one of the islands, along with the first poem I ever wrote in Eugene. Both appeared in my last book, The Next World.

The bird photos (not mine) are just a few examples of what we recently saw down at the ponds. But the great blue herons are almost always there. More numerous at certain times of the year, less so during the winter. I think of them as the guardian monks and nuns of the ponds…

 

Heron, December 

1.

Her long neck

is pulled deep

into a grey-blue mantle.

Yellow eyes stare

across dark water.

 

2.

I pull in.

The ground is cold.

Water, still.

A few feathers

lift and settle

as the moon rises. 

 

 

 I leave you with another one from Delta Ponds, written in Mid-December of 2024.

  

Fog

 

       There are shadows within shadows.

Something calls out. The call

                        comes from everywhere:

a bird, a person, a bobcat

          floating out there, on a log, adrift.

Now I know I have

    always been a shadow. Keep walking,

         this might be the edge of the water.

Water particles hang, suspended,

around us, as if the world has

               stopped turning.

A head without a face turns away. 

A lone tree appears, bare,

     like a distant word heard inside a fire.

Now I know this

 is how everything comes into the world.

Something calls out again. The call

               is absorbed, lost.

My hands and feet hang, suspended,

   merge with mist.

There are turtles sleeping the winter off,

     settled in mud on the lake floor below.          

                     Take my hand.

 

 ******************************************

Happy Solstice!

 

Other Winter Solstice poems can be found at links below:

2024: Freezing Fog

2023: What Calls

2022: Tidepool

2021: Snow clouds, Space, Silence & Snow ghosts

2020: The Space Between 

Links to previous Solstice poems going back to 2011 can be found on the tab marked “Series” on the banner at the top of the blog.

All Winter Solstice poems will appear in a collection called The Solstice Book. Hopefully it’ll be published at the end of 2026.