Outside: the Hawk
Where will he land?
Soon soft snow will be a peaceful rug.
The hawk will hover seeking to enter.
I have shut each window, tightened every lock.
I know the tree where he will wait poised.
I know the window he'll choose.
I know how his sharp talons grip and eviscerate.
The neighborhood is darker than last week.
Ice daggers hang ready to plummet from edges of rooves.
The hawk is somewhere or nowhere.
I step outside, then in.
I wait.
***
Holly Guran, author of Twilight Chorus (Main Street Rag), River of Bones (Iris Press) and the chapbooks River Tracks and Mothers' Trails, earned a Massachusetts Cultural Council award and coordinates a popular Boston reading series. Her work has appeared in journals including Poet Lore, Santa Fe Literary Review, and Salamander. Her narrative poems, based on a 19th century correspondence between a mill girl and the editor she married, have been performed in Boston and at the Lowell National Historic Park.