You and I Saw Hawks Exchanging the Prey
By James Wright
They did the deed of darkness
In their own mid-light.
He plucked a gray field mouse
Suddenly in the wind.
The small dead fly alive
Helplessly in his beak,
His cold pride, helpless.
All she receives is life.
They are terrified. They touch.
Life is too much.
She flies away sorrowing.
Sorrowing, she goes alone.
Then her small falcon, gone.
Will not rise here again.
Smaller than she, he goes
Claw beneath claw beneath
Needles and leaning boughs,
While she, the lovelier
Of these brief differing two,
Floats away sorrowing,
Tall as my love for you,
And almost lonelier.
Delighted in the delighting,
I love you in mid-air,
I love myself the ground.
The great wings sing nothing
Lightly. Lightly fall.
Copyright Credit: James Wright, “You and I Saw Hawks Exchanging Prey” from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright © 1990 by Anne Wright. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.
Source: Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1990)