Weary Waders

We are filling the air with everything:
our piping calls, the feathers we
lose on our weary flight. See
how overhead cloud hides
us from one another,
as we herald the arrival of autumn. One thing
you must remember is that we  
return from our northern nests always
together, while some just want
to stop off on the way south, others long to
stay for the winter. You will see
us all marching along the shore. What
you don’t see are the worms and shellfish, the food that is
beneath our webbed feet, hidden
in polluted mud and sand. By
the time we are gone, you will wonder what
that rush of travel-weary waders was, and we
will be off again, the last waders you may ever see.

Kim M. Russell, 8^th October 2026

Mish is our host for this Thursday’s Open Link Night at the dVerse Poets Pub, and she has given us an optional mini-prompt featuring René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist artist and his famous painting, ‘Son of Man’.

I love Magritte and his depictions of familiar objects in unusual places, and I included one of his paintings in my Quadrille prompt in April 2018, ‘Don’t rain on my parade’ which you can read here.

I was interested in the quote from Magritte about ‘Son of Man’, which Mish shared with us, so when I read that the optional mini-prompt today is to write poems inspired by the painting or the quote, I thought I’d try a golden shovel from these words: “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.”