The Duck With The Giant Legs

By T

They said I was wrong before I learned what “wrong” meant.

Too much of me where they had less.

Legs like twin oaks in a family of reeds.

They waddled quick and neat,

I moved slow and towering,

a rhythm the pond didn’t yet understand.

At dinners, they whispered.

At swims, they left me behind,

not because I couldn’t keep up,

but because my stride made ripples

that reached farther than theirs ever could.

I tried to fold myself smaller,

bend the gift I was born with,

just to fit the narrow spaces

they’d left for me.

But my legs ached with the shrinking,

and my heart ached with the silence.

It took a heron to tell me

“Those legs aren’t a curse.

They’re the reason you’ll walk

to ponds no one else in your family will see.”

Now I wade where water runs deep,

where the lily pads are wide as dreams,

where the wind tells me I was never too much

only too far ahead.

And maybe they’ll never follow.

Maybe they’ll always stay in their small circle of reeds.

But I have found a horizon

that only a duck with legs like mine

could reach.

my long legs,

once seen as a curse now carries me to distances they will never see.

By T