Kite hangs in the blue air
Cold eyes see only death and dying
Not the glint of sunlight on wavelets
Nor the white winged grace of the gull.
For the raptor life is simple
It balances on a breeze
Wheels on a wingtip with death.
Black Kite
Tag: death
Fox waits
Shoots stems stamens
Stalks and sap striving.
Roots and rhyzomes
Deep in the damp dark
Digging and delving.
Leaf furls worm curls
wave rolls on the windswept beach
Hail batters rain patters
And the raw smell of animal hair.
The bird in the egg struggles
Magpie snatches.
Hawk hovers
Voles mice shrews scatter.
And cradled in the warm earth
Fox curls around her young
Waiting for the wheel to turn.
Spring Earth
Dark earth twitches with tiny life,
Pale and grotesque,
Blindly industrious,
And sharp crocus spears thrust to the light
Through last year’s rotting leaves.
No human values apply in the real world.
The slug, the crook-legged insects,
The sharp smell of rottenness,
All have their place with the new, unfurled leaf,
The graceful curve of a rose petal
And heady garden scents.
The rose dies, a brown sludge
And brambles bar the way as well as any wire.
Songbirds die exhausted after winter fast
And plumage dulls beneath the creeping lice.
Beauty and ugliness
Two words with meaning only in the world of man
Who makes and breaks and judges what shall be and what shall die.
Give me the morning, sharp and cloud-smudged
With the tang of rain in the wind
And I will raise my face to the sky.
The man-made paradise
With shark-free lagoons of heavenly blue,
Concrete pools, ice-chinking drinks
And misery behind the barrier of palms
Is uglier far than this dark earth
Creeping and busy, full of dead and dying
And life.
Jane Dougherty Writes 