At the Medieval Faire we watch
two women in leather jerkins
cinched with wide brown belts and
tethered to their wrists a peregrine
hawk with its dark head and slate wings
and a barn owl with a face like
a Venn diagram and the hawk handler says
They don’t like being
with us so we can’t
pet them and they won’t
fly to glove
for food because the
hawk will ball
its claws up and punch
its prey to break
its neck before eating
it
but we keep these big
birds fed and
protected so they are
getting all their
needs met and aren’t
looking for another
relationship and all the
couples and maybe
some singles in the crowd laugh and
the hawk handler blushes. She didn’t
mean it that way not at all and I look
at you with your camera to your eye
twisting the lens for a close-up of the owl’s
white face floating in the dim tent and know
the cat will spring at our ankles when
we walk in the door she will bare
her teeth and pounce preparing for the day she’ll
take us down with matching thuds and eat us
beginning with our eyes
and know we were getting all our needs met
Tanis MacDonald is the
author of five books of poetry and essays, including Out of Line: Daring to
Be an Artist Outside the Big City, and the editor of two
collections. Her next poetry book, Mobile, will be out with
Book*hug in Fall 2019. Recent work has appeared in Atlantis, Understorey,
Prairie Fire, and Lemon
Hound. She lives in Waterloo, Ontario.
the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
No comments:
Post a Comment