Hawk, Winter
Bedtime prayers move apartment walls
giving life to silence, as if wings were rising
outside the window.
Snug under his quilt, I read my son his favorite book
Where the Sidewalk Ends as snow presses hard against the sill.
Somewhere there is always war
a desert or city ghetto where boys try to defeat
the enemy with stones
innocent bodies stacked like cordwood.
Life, that white chip that can disappear as quickly
as a roll of dice while the soul goes on.
Overnight the pond behind our building
is one frozen blank eye. Overnight trees have naked arms.
Out of nowhere a hawk dives
its eye a great reticulated yellow orb.
Just in time I pull my son into my arms
my child who will always be too young to wade
through sauna jungles
to hide waist-deep in mined rice paddies
to sleep with one eye open.
Late evening sun transforms the prism in our window
into a rainbow on the wall
all the colors within the body: golden fat, soft
and pulpy like the inside of an orange
pink intestines, crimson pools that fade to purple.
Our president comes on TV delivering the rat-a-tat-tat
of big guns. Friendly fire. Collateral damage.
Turning down the volume, I watch stern men move silent mouths
but still hear their slogans: God is in our cockpit.
I am stronger than you are. Thumb in nose. Far away smart bombs
hone in on targets that have eyes
and hearts as shades of red bleed into the desert.
My hands steady the dulcimer
while my son’s small fingers caress the strings
bestow tiny bursts of heavenly sharps
and flats, his touch
the trembling wingtip of a dove.
Light candles for his seventh birthday
angel food cake, a magician’s set with black cape
and gold wand. Balloons filled with ghosts drift toward heaven
if I let go for a second. My love blows soapy bubbles through a ring
that gleams with his brightest breath.
Gentle puffs float through winter dusk, along the rim
of the window sill, out into the suddenly warm night.
May the wings I heard be angels
instead of hawks. May the magician’s wand
make war vanish. May our world not end with a headline
a slogan, a fiction redder than the Cedars of Lebanon:
Pax Americana.
Fang baring.
Brilliant display of plumage.
(from the anthology The Poetry Of Nursing, Kent State Univ. Press, 2005.)
