Thai Stork

The stork stands

in the fat finger of water from
the rice field that has poked 
its way all but unseen into
the tall grass by the side

of the house.

He looks suspicious,

like a thin old man with

a downcast face wearing

an oversized gray coat

standing alone outside 
a grammar school.

You wonder

what he might be up to

when he puts his head

between his legs and

obscenely filches for

something down below.

When upright

he knows he has been

seen and stands stalk still

looking at you with a

one-eyed dementia that

only the wild things know.

He takes to

the air with one flap

of his yard-wide wings

that make no sound.

He flies low

in and out of the trees

but not above them to

the flat emptiness of the

rice field where his oddness

dissolves as he lands to

just a dot on a field of green.

FG  June 5, 2012

All rights reserved by the author Forrest Greenwood.

I keep working on this.  My goal is to describe him in anthropomorphic terms and then turn him back to being a bird.