A poem by Will Burns.
Looking through itself at the stickleback
shadow play below the surface.
Though perhaps (a schoolboy reflex)
it’s just staring at its feet.
The diagnostic yellow somehow clearer,
more distinct, in the ditchwater refraction.
At the part they call ‘the Wides’,
where the narrowboats used to turn around
before this section was given over to likeness,
there is bankside bittern-memory.
But theirs and the canal’s boom-times are done
and now this other heron’s here in its vacated, echoed niche.
*
Will Burns is a writer based in Buckinghamshire. He is the author of two poetry collections and a novel, and he works as an editor at Rough Trade Books.