Osprey

Like a Visigoth who rakes the sky with war cries, an osprey screams, clutching a snake in its talons. He is flying back to his encampment, a wingspread-wide nest atop a Norfolk Island pine. With its stubby green branches—like caterpillar legs—the tree is the highest point on this barrier island, an osprey twofer: height to protect the nest, height to hunt the fish a flash of wings away.

To some the ospreys’ calls sound like a code of dot-and-dash chatter, but others know better: these are raptors in rapture, feasting upon Roman hearts.

 

Minnows

As if someone beneath the sea had flipped scores of silver coins at once, a legion of fork-tailed minnows leaps into the air to escape a school of sheepshead, fish in prison stripes that speed along the lips of tidal pools where the curl of the sea breaks and seethes onto shore. Still other minnows lunge into the wash of waves that surges onto the sand, returning with the receding water to the sea. Yet, a desperate few fall stranded when the next wave might come too late to save them from swooping gulls who savor such ocean manna.

A freshly beached minnow appears at our feet. We become its guardians, glaring at any gull who draws near, and just then, a wave returns our little minnow to the sea.

The school of sheepshead passes.

 

Yellow-crowned Night Herons

Birds of the perpetual shrug. Like teenage gamers—shoulder-slouched, alert to threats—one heron hunches on the nest; the other hunches two feet away. They reside at the end of a long spare branch, alert like sentries overseeing a long driveway. Here dangers cannot hide; distance imparts added seconds to strike any serpent bent on their eggs. When threatened, a heron becomes an illusionist. He goes big, spiking the yellow feathers about its neck into a crown large enough for an emperor. But now the herons are placid, their hackles subdued into mere markings.

At dawn, they will be there. With shrugs.

 

Dolphins

Sure, the dolphins could nonchalantly touch the sea’s surface and sip the air, but not today. Today they are joyful, boisterous. One by one they arc over the water, rising and curling downwards back to the sea. Lift and curl. Lift and curl, all the while their eyes upon us. Onlookers see the smile beneath each bottled nose. Some call it a smirk.

 

Egret

A dozen feet from the dripping foot shower, the Great Egret stands like a white spire. From a wooden fence above the oleander, he oversees our return from the sea, silently blessing our absolution from sand and sin. This manifestation of flesh and feathers, this silent seer of souls, this redeemer lets us pass.

After benediction, he will breakfast in bracken waters on wayward fish, and consecrate frogs before plucking them from ponds like a connoisseur. Saints must eat too.

Curt Pawlisch

began to read and write poetry in high school. After jobs in politics, and then a legal career, he returned to his “first love” in retirement. In recent years he has concentrated on Japanese short-form poetry. His haiku, senryu, tanka, haibun, and haiga have appeared in a variety of online and print publications, including Akitsu Quarterly; cattails; contemporary haibun online; Drifting Sands Haibun; Failed Haiku; First Frost; Laurels (Tanka Society of America); Poetry Pea Journal; Prune Juice Journal; Quail Eggs: A Tanka Journal; Scarlet Dragonfly Journal; and tsuri-dōrō, among others. His interest in haibun led him to prose poetry. He counts Pablo Neruda, Dylan Thomas, Robert Bly, Mary Oliver, and Billy Collins as influences on his work.

Pawlisch lives with his wife in Madison, Wisconsin, and they have two adult daughters.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Haiga by Curt Pawlisch (Line 1: “fields of soldiers”) in contemporary haibun online, Haiga Gallery 21.3 (30 November 2025), Image 32 of 47

⚡ Editor’s Choice: commentary by Allison Williams on a tanka by Pawlisch (Line 1: “monarchs”) in Quail Eggs (Issue 1, June 2025)

⚡ Haiga by Pawlisch (Line 1: “walking shadows—”) in contemporary haibun online, Haiga Gallery 20.1 (April 2024), Image 17 of 37

⚡ Going Places, haibun by Pawlisch in Drifting Sands Haibun (Issue 26, March 2024)