LIFE AND DEATH OF A HAWK

Here, where no roc blots out the sun,

Albatross never comes, no eagle soars,

He ruled the high blue kingdom,

Bird matins he disdained, was already gone

Long before sunset, puzzled us over his home

Bole, rushes, sea-cliff or mountain?

Did he sleep at all while the owl

Explored the dark for stranded mice,

With the Hunter round the pole?

The height he maintained with secret entrance

And exit, kept his colour, size and form

Vague, as befits kings.

Add to these perfect silence, singularity

And that ceaseless, solitary wheeling

Round the sun; you might have said he

Belonged to the firmament: the second act of creation,

Launched after the sun was lit,

Before the earth was balled and spun.

Logic snaps; this monarch of the air

Descending on a kitchenyard for a chicken,

Was shot and blundered like a drunkard up a-stair.

Three days, and in a little corpse nearby

Hung a grey thing in a veil of flies --

Dripping vent, eyes shut, neck stretched awry.

Patrick Fernando