The hawk rides the air over the hollow, wings fanned, a cry
that scatters all creatures small enough to be grasped by those talons. Shiku
ducks underneath the deck. Mo growls. We are coming up the hill from the
mailbox. The cry. Mo looks to the sky and pulls at his leash. How does he know?
Shiku knows because she almost was taken, once, as a kitten preening herself on
the railing of the deck, when suddenly the hawk swooped and was on her, wings
beating, covering her. She didn't try to move. John believes she succumbed to
the inevitable. But he, right there, rose up, waved his own human wings and
cried out his own human cry against the bird. Hawk abandoned the kitten
crouching under the churn of rising wings and flew away.
Danger rides the air and what are we to do? Terror rides the
currents disguised as beauty. Or is it the other way around?
What fragile creatures walk the earth, all of us, even the
hawk feels fragile in the current of John's human wings. We are all mere breath
and bone. How take it in? How hold it in the heart? Because we must if we
choose to live and be full-blown. Bones of glass, sand set to fire, made
liquid, shaped with breath.
Before I die may I breathe in everything I see, hear,
smell--everything that touches me or is touched. May everything, one at a time,
drift on breath through mind and heart and soul and along the pathways of spine
and nerves into my emptiness. And may I be formed, each bone, with that spirit,
that primordial Breath, fragile as I am, into something clear, something
beautiful, some one thing that contains it all. So that I can say in truth:
I am the
hawk that cries out,
I am the
wind,
I am the
small one hiding,
I am the
wing,
I am the
hunger and the food,
I am the danger,
I am the
beauty,
I am the bone,
I am the Fire.
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