Tuesday poem #310 : Tanis MacDonald : Hawks and Handlers

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