Sugaring

Rain

swashes snow through storm

drains.

March grows grey-doom

to form villages

enwrapped in smoke and gloom.

Winter's hibernation

still

enshrouds me.

I

tap myself searching for the sweet essence rising

in thaw-warmed days

following the influence of rime-coated

full-moon nights.

Thus spring's

resurgence delights

assuaging

winter's dark might.

The Sparrow Hawk

He is a watcher of our ways;

not of our interstellar routes

but of our current maze.

Superior to our swirlings;

He is an observer of our days

our comings, and our goings.

He finds a perch whereon he reigns

and if he alights on neither crag

nor post, the falcon hovers on wings,

in an incessant zigzag,

motionless in air, where he surveys

the grassy shoulders in summer haze.

When I hold my palm against the sun-rays,

to shade my vision, I see him

suspended, silhouetted. I succumb

to summer heat and have a whim

that he observes me whirl

on singing tires just as he notes

the locust singing a welcome

to the noon-time heat. He furls

his wings and plunges:

my loneliness reappears,

rises with the grasshopper

or the vole spiked on his spears.

He rests upon a cable; a knight.

And I; I rush on beneath his sight.