A collared dove crashes into your window. Shortly afterwards, a sparrowhawk devours a collared dove (or maybe woodpigeon) outside your window. Sometimes you just have to say what you see.
Another dove
Yesterday I saw your ghost –
A shocked angel printed on apparent air –
So clear, the bright of your eye was caught,
And your wing feathers, shrieked in fright.
Yes, you looked like someone who’d stepped from heaven
Into a void suddenly solid. The mark’s still there.
You flew away, less sure of space perhaps,
And your place in it. But alive. Some instinct must have tried
So hard to recalibrate. And could not.
Today you met your fate. There on the lawn, I saw
A sparrowhawk – shoulders hunched, thighs like pistons –
Pluck out your throat. You took an age to die.
It could have been another dove. A different window.
But the timing of it gave me pause. That and the suffering,
Of which I somehow felt the cause. I wrote this so you’d know.
