The Heron's Nest

Editors' Choices

The Heron's Nest Award

This stark and dramatic haiku is much more than an image in nature observed from afar. While we like to believe that nature offers stability and certainty in life—in spite of what we have all experienced when a storm threatens—this image creates mental dissonance long after our first read. Mountain ridges, mighty trees, and swirling winds contain a predictability that, to some extent, humans rely upon. When something is starkly changed, however, we are left uncertain and vulnerable. Our vulnerabilities rise up reading Yarrow's poem.

Some individuals identify the image described here as that of flag trees or banner trees. These references almost make them sound light-hearted, softening the reality of the underlying forces that took place to reshape them in the first place. I learned of flag trees from a younger brother when we were fishing from a rowboat in the Thousand Islands, situated in the St. Lawrence River, where summers are lovely and winters harsh. The scattering of islands, with spruce, fir and hemlock, provide a rocky toehold against the winds that blow from the same direction almost every day of the year. The trees appear sculpted, with windward-facing branches stunted, whereas on the leeward side—sheltered by the trunk—the limbs grow to a normal size. Yarrow sets this scene in her haiku. We know from the first line that we have been brought to a place exposed; one where all living things are vulnerable to the stresses of nature.

And therein lies a metaphor; often in life some of us will face a challenge head-on, while others of us will go with the flow. The hemlock points one way and in freeze frame indicates to us that resistance can prove futile. Nature offers us the dual opportunity to cling tightly to what we think we know or to address our dissonance and take the risk of letting go. And finally, can we embrace the discomfort of weathering the storm with an open heart?

Yarrow's hemlock with its arms reaching out suggests a longing for the stable and familiar, as if to remind us that the challenges we face carry a purpose if we choose to embrace them as such. It is not only the everyday pleasures and pressures we are afforded by life, but the reality of constant unpredictable change and uncertainty that make us who we are and who we will continue to become. In the final analysis, all of this will pass like the wind in Yarrow's poem taking us with it. And perhaps life, in its many mysteries and complexities, is best contemplated on the occasional windless day.

Tom Painting
September 2023