The Artist’s Touch The hawk affords no harbor for remorse. It waits and captures, carries off, and feasts in shady privacy on lesser beasts, a practice owls and eagles both endorse. The sparrows do not take long to come back. Their raptor, after all, is feeding now, not hunting. Parent birds show fledglings how to peck at seedcakes, safe from an attack. A feather and a strew of husks attest to much hectic activity, a lull, the continuity of breed and cull, those specialties of weather, need and nest. There’s not a breath of wind, each leaf in place, held still remorselessly, as if by grace.
Dan Campion‘s poems have appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). A selection of his poems was issued by the Ice Cube Press in July 2022: https://icecubepress.com/2021/10/01/a-playbill-for-sunset/
Amethyst Review 