The Eagle (Prose Poem)
This evening, about dusk, suddenly there was pandemonium outside my window that is also a door . . . the raised voices of sparrows, doves, squirrels and rabbits, each in their way screaming the same panic, scurrying frantically for cover . . . and I knew what it was even before I opened the door and stepped out.The eagle I had seen but once before had returned. It circled, dove twice, claws empty each time, and settled in the pine tree, looking down at his hunger and the feast that had eluded him, so close I could almost reach out and touch him.
For a moment that will last forever I could only watch, our eyes meeting for a few seconds in which neither he nor I could look away, and then, with a cry that could have been either despair or disdain, he lifted into the air that was filled with cries and flew off.
Panic slowly subsided and soon all was serene again, the birds and the earth-bound returning to their seeds and acorns and carrots, these creatures I feed and whose destiny, on another day, may be in turn to feed the eagle, a destiny no different from my own in some dusk of final reckoning.
For now, the eagle seeks his destiny and his dinner elsewhere and I feel sorry for him in a way, and yet still I would like to be him; to have in me and about me such grace and nobility, to be so perfectly adapted and fitted for living and surviving by pure instinct and relentless pursuit of purpose. To know again the hunger that eludes me now in my years, and yes, just once, to own the air and bend it to my will.
Wherever he went, wherever his hunger led him, some part of me goes with him.
Poetry by countryfog
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Written on 2011-02-27 at 21:25
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Lawrence Beck |
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John Ashleigh |
