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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84
Jan 3, 20231 min read

Poor, Poor Hawk, Vicious Hawk


Poor, Poor Hawk


Poor, poor hawk, vicious hawk,

Tan terror of the sky,

You look a sleeping, peaceful dove

In brown leaves where you lie.


Poor, poor hawk, mortal hawk,

What rank indignity!

A bumbling blue jay’s fluttered by

And plucked out your keen eye.


Poor, poor hawk, little hawk

I never saw you fly.

In fact, we never would have met

Except you had to die.


Poor, poor hawk, lifeless hawk,

I’ll dig a grave, then I

Will write a verse about your death

And end it with a sigh.


Yes, this is a real picture of a dead hawk that I found in the yard. It was a tiny thing, barely the length of my hand except for its tail feathers. I did not see it die, but I suspect it was pursuing birds from my bird feeder and either struck a tree limb or the dog pen fence. Clearly, its neck was broken. I could detect no other injuries. I certainly would not want this hawk using my feeder for its own deathtrap or hawk restaurant, but it still saddened me to find this noble and beautiful creature lying dead in my yard.

Anyway, I was working on another poem when it struck me what I wanted to say about the poor little hawk, and it took me---I don't know--maybe fifteen minutes to type the poem. What you have above is the first draft. I have not changed a word. ENJOY!

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I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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