I am so pleased to announce that the winner of Lit Shark Magazine’s February Poem of the Month contest is none other than Carol Edwards, who writes beautifully vulnerable, striking, ecopoetic, and imagistic poetry.

Her winning poem, “Still,” follows a blue heron as it enters a body of water, and the persona is at first taken by how the heron’s reflection appears in the water, but then they start to look at how the heron looks in the larger context of water meeting sky. How many of us tried as children to discern between water/land and sky; how many of us tried to see the true horizon? This poem tackles that in a beautifully elevated way, and the imagery is all at once striking, memorable, and deeply visceral. There’s both a dreamlike quality to it as well as a photographic one, and it’s haunting in the images it calls up. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

For each contest, the winner will receive a unique digital broadside of their winning poem, and the one I created can be found below. Though the poem is about more than “just” the blue heron, I loved that imagery so much that I wanted to make it the star of the show. The soft greens, blues, and other natural colors came together perfectly to represent the natural, subtle quietness of the observed, living world around us.