"We are chosen, blessed, broken, and given."
Henry J. Nouwen

The air smells of heat and dust
brushed with cedar and smoke.
Small groups of turkey vultures
circle the barren cornfields.
Far above them, a lone red-tail hawk
floats on air currents, wheels and plummets -
five hundred miles of prayer
arrowing towards her prey.
 
Between cornrows, hay and clover,
a whitetail rabbit bounds to her nest.
Outside her barrow, a family of crows
feast on yesterday's roadkill.
A groundhog is eating an applecore
next to the interstate, when Fate converges -
hunger, hawk, truck
(.   .   .   silence)
 
Tethered to her screened-in perch
at the North County Nature Center,
the broken-winged hawk dreams of flight:
emptiness, motion, bone, blood,
(a cautionary tale),
a sermon she could preach -
like Benediction,
like Kaddish.