Winter Hawks

An advent of raptors haunts the scant gray woods or loiters over mall roofs. We wake to their screams as if this were high sierra, not Ohio where parents try-out or manage children, open party stores, hunker through the coming and going of baby Jesus; de-ice puffer jackets, tend to flocks. Gloom is plowed behind snow dunes. The red-tails roam in loose federations. Their young, mob-handed and loutish, the mature work in pairs scything small birds, ripping through the thinning, the hold-outs, the weakened and walking. And the first born listen with the last of us while the hawks dance proclaiming their time. A time of fervid litany and electric barricades, of bobble hats and mittens, while a black brier raises bloody thorns in chary praise. ~~