Pratt's poem begins with a riddle: "To have without acquisition." How can you have something without getting it? The poem's answer is to look and not take. The "new hat, but not on the head" suggests the fashion trade that once turned birds into ornaments, and the poem refuses it. Here "only the eye" is "seduced with plumage." Beauty is allowed to work on the viewer, but it is not carried off. The rest of the poem tests that idea against a death and against an uncertain future.
The second stanza is a small act of looking. Pratt names the birds one by one: Great Egret, Green Heron, Little Blue Heron, Purple Gallinule. The language is a mix of field guide and dressmaker's catalogue. The egret is "dressed in lace and masked in green," as if it were at a costume ball, so the finery belongs to the bird and not to a hat. "Little Blue Heron blue" is a nice moment of near-tautology, because the bird's name and its colour are the same thing and cannot be separated. The line "Green Heron wing" is just a fragment, a single wing with no bird around it. Read one way, that is a quick colour note. Read another, it echoes the way birds were once broken into parts for sale. The stanza ends with "purple feathers, bill red and lavender," where the colours pile up as if the poet cannot stop looking.
The third stanza changes the mood. It names Guy Bradley, and the sentences become short and heavy. "Gave his life" sounds like sacrifice, but "shot in the back" says he was killed by someone who would not face him. Judging by the context, he died on the birds' side, though the poem does not explain how or why. The sounds in "shell-shored island" are hard and clipped, almost like a gunshot. Then comes the blunt line "Plumes worth more than gold." It has no verb and reads like a price tag. After the lush colours of the second stanza, this is the poem's account of what the feathers were worth to the people who wanted them, and what they cost.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme scheme, and it grows slowly: three lines, three, three, then five. The longer last stanza fits its subject, because it is where the poem looks past the single event toward the present. Its first word is "Now." The birds "stand unconcerned, preening," and their calm is almost painful, since they know nothing of Bradley or of the hats. They are "across the water among the trees." The distance is important. The speaker watches from the far side and takes nothing, which means the poem's opening wish has been granted. The viewer has the birds without acquiring them.
The ending is careful and uneasy. "Not enough water, the long grass river / not long enough, / but enough for now." The word "enough" appears three times and changes meaning each time. First it is a complaint about shortage, and then it becomes a fragile kind of consolation. The "long grass river" is a striking image, and judging by that phrase the place seems to be a vast, shallow wetland. The line break after "not long enough" lets the phrase mean both that the river is too short in space and that time is running short. The final "for now" gives no real security, only a pause.
The poem matters because it holds so much in sixteen lines without raising its voice. It is a catalogue of beauty, a memorial to one named person, a comment on greed, and a quiet warning, all at once. It does not lecture the reader. It lets "plumes worth more than gold" sit next to birds simply standing in the water, and the contrast makes the argument. By the end, protection looks like something small and fragile that needs attention: the birds are safe "for now," and the poem asks the reader to keep that from slipping away.