Cedar

Winter day
Cloudy sky
Stillness
Except the birds
Who seek
Food.

Above
The deafening silence
The red shouldered hawk
Calls
From the pecan trees
Of my childhood...

Crows
'Caw'
In the south...
The fly westward
Chasing
The hawk
Of out THEIR woods...

And still the hawk
Calls...

Wren knows this call
Is not the call
Of the hunt.
She returns to her song...

A brown creeper
Scratches its way up the pine
Chickadee and titmouse
Fly to and from...

A ruby crowned kinglet
Hangs upside down
Fetching its meal...

Still the hawk calls

Still the crows chase...

Until
It
Stops...

Until
It leaps
Into
Flight
Air catching under his wings

In one
Powerful
Wing beat...
His body lifts
Easily
To the sky.

In the flash of a mere second
The voice that filled
The silence
Becomes the voice
Of the silence...

The world
Returns
To winter.