Williams’s Song

John James Audubon, Snowy Heron (ca. 1826)

I’d rather read an account

of a hidden

Carolina swamp where

the white heron breeds

protected from

the hunters reached only across

half sunken logs a place

difficult of access the females building their nests

in the stifling heat the males

in their mating splendor than to witness

finish reading here

–William Carlos Williams, Song first published in Harper’s, June, 1961.