Winter Hawks

An advent of raptors loiters over mall roofs. hooded eyes scope the neon-lit spaces, the concreted waste lands. We wake to their screams as if this were High Sierra, not Ohio where parent’s try-out or manage children, open party stores, hunker through the coming and going of baby Jesus; de-ice puffer jackets. Gloom is plowed behind snow dunes. The red-tails roam in loose federations, their young, mob-handed and loutish, the mature work alone, scything through small birds, the weakened and walking. The hawks wing-dance proclaiming their time, a time of frost-bitten electric barricades, of bobble hats and mittens, while unseen, a wind-rattled thorny brier, recites its litany of seasonal prayers.