Page 63 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2
P. 63
THE HUNTERS
Where will the redtails hunt
A-‐hover on the summer wind
When all this broken country
Grows cul-‐de-‐sacs, not hay?
And where will falcons stoop
Shadows splash on rough breaks
When the rusted scythe teeth
Have cut their final row?
The ribcage of a coyote hangs
On a singing barbed-‐wire gate
The wind has long since taken
What the coyote might have robbed.
Out here in these clay-‐hard hills
Real estate is king
Scavenging from dying farms
What sweat could not persuade: Coyote pausing to sniff the air.
A living from the land.
The hunters are the first to hear
The coyotes and the hawks
Their shadows pass, swift and gone
Like a songbird in the falcon’s eye.
Notes:
I wrote this poem many years ago while living in Montana, where a real-‐estate boom was making quick
work of the remaining prairie and farms fields surrounding Bozeman. Witnessing the destruction of a
remnant ecosystem broke my heart.
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