(1) Heavy Hawk
That he has been in light binds him
home to the circle, ever aloft and going
wherever a dawn’s faint ray finds him,
held to his height, orbiting his knowing
as so many rivers under his straining quills,
so many fading shells lying broken
over the valley that his shadow fills,
every break one breath’s token.
How could he fall, and leave the glint behind
that singed his feathers into spreading wider,
waiting harder, lone enough to find
home in what finally lifts the truth-rider
out of the wind and into farther birth,
tracing a coming ring around the earth?
(2) Dead Thrush 2
Now every morning, since the time I found
a thrush dead by dawn, day-broken,
lying beside my window man-bound,
downed before his warm word was spoken –
now every day at dawn I look to see
if I can find another – if there come
a brother breathing out and down for me,
saying it nearly: friend, so close and dumb.
Is it an end they come to me to find?
Or is my eye an opening, a ring
through to a heaven, giving out of wind
and into quiet’s wider beginning?
I’d rather see them dead than not at all:
brothers that tried, tried to more than fall.
--Lloyd Haft (from Where Is the Body That Will Hold?, 1998)
