Now ravenous with hunger,
he rips to shreds a pigeon in the park.
Around and above him loom young birches
spreading their branches like wings.
Across from this, a courthouse, doors agape,
dispenses justice with an iron talon.
Across the street, a bank dome points toward the sky,
its hooded shadow spread across the afternoon.
Before any symbol of commerce stood,
generations of red-tailed hawks
fed on the weaker, inferior prey,
as this hawk feeds on a pigeon now
under the trees.
People walk by him as if blindfolded.
They forget not long ago they lived in trees,
prey to whatever hungry creature
chose to snatch them from a bower.
Now they would judge, doubt, and blame
with a steady finger; wage endless,
bloody war, yet call all death evil.
The red-tailed hawk feasting on fresh blood:
This is the truth of the universe.
7 comments:
Ack! That background color is a bit overwhelming. How about something a little more neutral?
I’m getting the idea that you’re into blood and guts and ripping and shredding of flesh? I'm afraid to say - I do NOT GET poetry. Would it offend you if I asked you to explain it? :-)
Kevin,
I'm open to suggestions on a color.
I've also reduced the size of my picture, but I can't seem to remove the picture from layout. When I click on Remove Image in Layout, it doesn't remove the image. I want to remove the image so I can try putting up a smaller one.
Becky,
It would not offend me to explain it; however, there are two camps in the arts field, one that says "I leave it up to you to decide what the work is about," and another which says, "I feel obliged to justify the work to you."
The only thing I will say is that a poet simply records what he or she sees, real or imaginary. Meaning does not necessarily come from what the poet writes but the way the reader interprets it. Here goes an ATTEMPT to explicate, but I warn you that you should try to find your own meaning. What the hawk does to the pigeon makes you realize how much greater you are than the lower animals because you have morality. But you should realize the poem does not glory in violence for its own sake. The hawk is only doing what it has done as a species for millions of years. How much more terrible is what the hawk does in the poem versus what human beings do everyday to have food on the table? When we go to the supermarket, we take the chicken out of the frozen section having NO knowledge that its life may have been taken in an even more gruesome way. How different are we from the lower animals in that sense? We have to eat to survive. In this we are just like them, as we are also part of the animal kingdom (I think humans forget this). One thing that separates us from the lower animals is a highly developed brain, which we, it seems to me, rarely use properly. With that brain comes morality. If the creatues in the poems were two human beings, we would say they are wrong or evil to kill each other. It's one thing for one creature to kill another for survival and another to kill it for a non-survival reason, such as killing because you don't like the color of another's skin or killing because you don't like the other's religion. Our brethren in the rest of the animal kingdom don't just kill for the sake of killing. They also have no remorse when they kill to eat because there is no reason for remorse when you are hungry. We are the ONLY creatures on the planet who kill others OF OUR OWN KIND for reasons other than to eat them, and if we killed other people to eat them, somehow it is considered disgusting. We are the only creatures who have remorse for the death of other people and other animals. We "call all death evil" because our beliefs tell us death is a bad thing and that killing is a bad thing. It is bad if there is a system of morality, but if there is no system of morality, as in the rest of the animal kingdom, then how can we point fingers? Also, in our wars we have killed far greater numbers than any species of animal has killed another. In that we are hypocrites to expect other creatures to act like us.
when you upload a new pic the old one will disappear.
Color is cool. I'm tired of a world in black and white.
Tired of a world in black and white? How about shades of grey, or maybe the color of the sea or mountains? Anything but beige--too suburban conformist.
Joy:
I TRIED uploading the new picture, but it didn't work. The old one is still there.
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