Margi Abraham
Return
After days of heavy rain, the banks of the small lake have flooded, and water has sneaked onto the golf course. Now swampy, it is becoming the wetland it was meant to be.
Nevertheless, we walk our usual track along the perimeter, under bowing gum trees. Puddles invite my granddaughter to kick water high into the air. Her joy seems to reply to the welcome calls of water birds, now congregating on the flat, wet fairways.
We watch as spoonbills, like doddery old gentlemen, strut and poke. Pelicans can’t decide whether to fly or galumph to the lake’s deeper water. As misty drizzle beads our jackets, we squelch in our mud-laden boots back to higher ground before it rains again.
a pelican
folded for flight
soars high
with such easy grace
freed from feet
About the Author
Margi Abraham is a free verse and tanka poet who lives on the northern edge of Sydney, Australia. Her tanka and tanka prose have been published in Eucalypt, red lights, Ribbons, Bamboo Hut, International Tanka, and Drifting Sands Haibun.