To the Hawk Outside the Brand-New Mosque of Lombard, Illinois
Unbelieving and prodigal, just here for a funeral, I bargain
as you click a raptor toe on the roof of my hastily parked
soft burrow, which is also my red exit and, as such, all my next days.
Was this where a homey branch held your childhood
nest, before you got the tough-loving push? Before the invading
mammals held out permits and loans in trembling hands,
stretched out black asphalt and put up concrete minarets. Or before
when they prayed for years in heated tents over gravel, as you circled
overhead and the white men in orange helmets that we paid
—and sometimes I use we, when speaking to hawks—
drove home each night and made dubious accounts of their aches?
Or before that, when we were just a potluck in the borrowed space
of the unitarian church, near the campus where the students could pretend
to eat like they did at home. Where the imam smiled as a skinny
engineering student sat next to me and tried, so earnestly,
to make conversation and gave me the chance to pretend, too
—were you keen to find others then, were you studying vague
traces of shell? Or before that, when your well-flapped woods
were cut by nothing but a strand of blue highway, and my father brought me
to the barely finished basements and cold garages of grocery store owners
—where the creaking cabbies led our bowing and praying, and collections
were raised for one of the brighter versions of the future, did this hawk
—did you, I say—know that some rituals built into our bodies
would lead us both here, when all the obligations were reduced to wind
and ashes? Those same old men, just today, marked on their waistlines
how tall I once stood. Just here, where your talons and our fine memories
find nothing to hold but the sight of a holy remnant of trees
on the far side of the road. They wave to us and cause our flight feathers,
our undyed cotton pennons made for prayer in other climates to wave,
so earnestly, in response. We listen and retake our positions:
me, an unfulfilled darting along the busy ground,
you, an unforgiving eye in the hard marble sky—us
in my soft burrow, in your red exit, in all our next days.
Ali Abid (he/him) is a writer, civil rights attorney, and policy advocate. He has been a featured storyteller at Pour One Out, a monthly storytelling series hosted by Volumes Bookcafe. Ali lives and works in Chicago.
Amethyst Review 