Posts Tagged hawk
PERSPECTIVES
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on July 31st, 2010
From the long window on the half landing, I saw,
almost as soon as you had filled the small bird feeders
under the pine and come inside, the big beasts land
to eat the scattered seeds – three wood pigeons, two turtle doves
and a solitary magpie -Â then a cat appear, the birds scramble
and you again, shooing.
From where the hawk stoops, I heard the magpie’s
irrelevant chatterings, saw a tableau of live flesh;
saw our Victorian suburb from where the airplane flies -
heard nothing above the thrumming of the engines;
from beyond the stratosphere, saw somewhere
still not yet silenced by the enveloping yellow
of the Sahara or the Arctic’s melting blue.
From the long window, I heard the next track begin -
late Billie Holiday, ‘Dancing Cheek to Cheek’ -
heard her miss the key change yet again, promised myself
never to play it yet again.
AND WITH A LITTLE PIN
Posted by David Selzer in Poetry on September 17th, 2009
Flint Castel, Samuel & Nathaniel Buck, 1742
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On liberty’s last morning, he said mass
in the Great Tower – the chapel was cold
as winter. August’s sun warmed the rebels
riding along the estuary shore,
their drums silent. He watched from the walls.
At his back, the seas breaking on Ireland. King
and Usurper, first cousins, exchanged
purple words in the base court, a surfeit of
epithets: bombast, self-pity. Serfs
were indifferent but Richard’s dog fawned
on new majesty. The epicure
who bespoke a coat of cloth of gold
rode captive from Flint to London in the same
suit of clothes. Through Chester he was jeered, stoned.
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Twenty miles inland, a sandstone hill
 - sheer to the west – rises from the plain.
Parliament’s army sacked the castle.
Westwards there is the estuary’s mouth,
the livid sea. Above twitching fern,
a hawk stoops. Stones, flung into the well’s blackness,
fall through the hill seawards and never sound.
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Beeston Castle, Cheshire, Benjamin Pouncy, 1773
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