Classic Poem

That harbinger of God's hardness, North
American Goshawk — storm-
grey above, ice-grey beneath — segment
of a winter azimuth — de-
tached herself from this morning and
seized a black hen and caromed
thirty yards through the soft snow, wrenching
feathers and flesh out, too
blood-crazy to kill clean. . . .

Tell me
if it's not hard how a haggard
hasn't even the hangman's mercy
but tears the heart out alive — that she
should have been made so;

and so, too, that when the dog
ran yapping and drove her off,
the grey crucifer levitated
in such a cold pride of windblown
lightness over the tines of the trees

you'd have forgiven her, even
if she could have torn
in that worse way there is:
with a word, never breaking the skin.