Daniel Whitehead Hicky's sonnet-length poem plays a quiet trick on the reader, and the title is where the trick begins. We are told we are looking at wood ibis by moonlight, but the poem never once names a bird. What we get instead is a cypress swamp that seems to bloom at night, and only gradually do we realise that the "blossoms" may be living things waiting to fly.
The poem is built on a before-and-after. In the first four lines the speaker remembers the swamp "by setting sun," when its waters glowed with "amber" and "the hot / Slow molten gold of day's last light." The language is thick and heavy: "molten," "slow," "hot." Light behaves like metal poured into the water. Then comes the pivot at the end of line four, where the swamp is described as a "darkening spot" that no "white wing" has visited. The speaker returns by moonlight, and the palette flips from gold to white. Where the sunset made the scene feel hot and liquid, the moon makes it cool, hushed and solid: stumps "white as snow," trees "withered" yet somehow "blossoming."
That word "blossoming" is the poem's central sleight of hand. The trees are withered, the stumps dead, yet the speaker sees flowers. The phrase "the hush of flowers" is especially lovely, because it borrows a quality of sound to describe a sight, as though the whiteness itself were silent. Judging by the closing lines, these white shapes are probably roosting birds that look like petals against the dark wood. The poem never confirms this outright, and that restraint is its charm. The reader is left holding two images at once, garden and flock, and the poem lets them blur.
The final movement is where the poem lifts off, literally. The speaker imagines that "a single word would wake the garden here," and the whole scene would answer: the "folded blossoms" would "suddenly / Spread wide their petals and, soaring white and clear, / Give back their full-blown beauty to the sky." The verbs are carefully chosen. "Folded" suggests both closed petals and tucked wings, and "spread wide" works for both too. The ambiguity pays off here, because the flower-to-bird transformation is the whole point. The speaker holds back, though. The key word is "If": the call is only imagined. There is a tension between the wish to see the spectacle and the reluctance to disturb the stillness, and the poem stays inside that held breath.
Formally, the poem has twelve lines of iambic pentameter, the ten-syllable line with its steady da-DUM beat, which suits the unhurried, reflective mood. Lines like "Its waters ran with amber and the hot" fall into that rhythm easily, while enjambment (sentences spilling over line endings, as in "the hot / Slow molten gold") keeps the verse flowing the way water does. The rhymes are alternating in the opening lines (sun/one, hot/spot) and the poem keeps pairing endings through "see/tree," "flowers/hours," and "suddenly/sky," a looser fit that echoes the soft, drifting quality of the scene. That final near-rhyme of "suddenly" with "sky" is a small gift: the poem ends by pointing upward, and the rhyme leaves the reader's attention in the air.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It has no argument and no story beyond a return visit to a place. Its achievement is perceptual: it shows how light changes what a landscape is, and how the mind, given the right conditions, reads life into dead wood. The contrast between sunset and moonlight, between "molten gold" and snow-white, teaches a lesson in looking, namely that the same spot can hold entirely different truths depending on when you arrive. And because the birds stay unnamed until we infer them from the title, the poem rewards the patient reader, the one who, like the speaker, waits quietly and is shown something.