This poem is reflecting on the last few days of my father’s life. I was thinking of a photograph he once took of Sand Hill Cranes during their great migration to the Platte River Valley. They sleep standing upright in shallow water and it sometimes forms a thin layer of ice around their feet. In the morning they must pull their feet out of the ice before they can take flight. I wanted to build a poem around that image.
Sharon Venezio is the author of The Silence of Doorways (March 2013, Moon Tide Press). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the New York Quarterly, Grew Sparrow, Spillway, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript about dementia.
