Hawk by Mary Oliver This morning the hawk rose up out of the meadow’s brose and swung over the lake it settled on the small black dome of a dead pine, alert as an admiral, its profile distinguished with sideburns the color of smoke, and I said: remember this is not something of the red fire, this is heaven’s fistful of death and destruction, and the hawk hooked one exquisite foot onto a last twig to look deeper into the yellow reeds along the edges of the water and I said: remember the tree, the cave, the white lilly of resurrection, and that’s when it simply lifted its golden feet and floated into the wind, belly-first, and then it cruised along the lake – all the time its eyes fastened harder than love on some uninimportant rustling in the yellow reeds — and then it seemed to crouch high in the air, and then it turned into a white blade, which fell.
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 02:01:09 +0000