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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.


Copyright © Eric Ashford

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Book: Shattered Sighs