Summer Poetry by Steven Ris

Editor's note: It was a year ago that we received Steven Ris' first submission, and this summer we received a submission for 2026. Of course, this makes an editor smile once again!

Last year, Steven wrote,

My wife, Jean, and I are full-time residents of TI Park. I am a retired teacher, now in my second post-employment year of reading, writing and loving life here on the River.

And this summer he continues:

The islands wake with the return of the Great Blue Heron. Life bourgeons everywhere with the River's flow. May it always be so.

The Heron Waits

To ride that glidepath as the heron does,
her invisible column of air mastered
lo, these countless millennia,
staggering our puny ride to the moon.

Or as her mate stalks prey on the shoreline,
poised in primeval stillness
while eons provide the wary skink,
bared but bonded in the epochs.

Is it the vestigial heron in me
from billions of years past
that gives me flight in my dreams,
as I soar over the blithe crowd?

I am as a trifle in their eyes
who pass sedated beneath me.
Grounded in disenchantment,
I wake to the transience of my humanity.

While in sublime patience the heron listens.
Unperturbed in stoic stillness, he waits,
turns his head to the infinitesimal vibration
and flaps his wings in languid ascent.

Where Nothing Weeps (Any ideas for an illustration - actually may not need one).

The curve that stretches beyond my seeing
And past everything I do not know
Is alive and breathing in that tiny being,
That black fly upon my toe.

I am missing from that wide expanse
From all that runs and flies and slinks and creeps
That holds it all in time and circumstance
With fate and death where nothing weeps.

I know I do not care when I say I do,
When my every step speaks aloud my aim,
When there’s more dominion to subdue
And families of others for me to name.

They do not seem to care as I go by
Even as I leave them alive or dead
They only disappear without a sigh
And do not blame me for the plague I spread.

Passive creatures all, they do appear
From prodigious whales to the smallest mite.
But whose passing from the scene draws near
As I perpetrate a blight?

How heavy is my stride as I tread the earth,
Ten billion generations beneath my feet.
At what point did I spoil my human worth
And when will my ruin be complete?

By Steven Ris,

Header Photo: "Evening Flight" 2020 TI Life Honorable Mention Photograph by Karen Schaack, ©2020.