Poetry Friday -- Hawku

LOST AND FOUND

ACT 1

The hawks are whistling.
Every morning I listen,
wonder, imagine.

The nest, constructed
in a pignut hickory,
is hidden and safe.


ACT 2

Hawks in the city
remind us we are not far
from the wild. Ever.

Are they as aware
of me as I am of them?
I capture moments:

Whistling and screeing,
piercing dives through tree branches,
perching on our fence.


ACT 3

Every hope broken --
hickory falls in the storm.
Hawk home is destroyed.

Morning after. Sun.
Mournful hawks call tree to tree,
"Our babies...lost...gone."

I hear, on day two...
three hawks! Three means one survived!
Next day I see four!


ACT 4

Listen -- can you hear
hawks in your neighborhood trees?
Listen with your heart.

Wonder -- they survive:
paramount in the food chain,
tree top predators.

Imagine -- next year

another nest, another success...

perhaps in your oak.

© Mary Lee Hahn, 2012

The Coopers Hawks in this story have been a source of fascination and wonder since last spring, when they courted noisily in the sky above our neighborhood, and then began building their nest in our neighbor's tree. They broke twigs from our oak tree for that nest. 

Late last June, as we drove home through the lashing winds and torrential rains of a severe thunderstorm, my thoughts were focused on our oak. "Please spare our oak, please spare our oak," was my mantra.

At the end of our street, we saw flashing red lights. When we got closer, I breathed a sigh of relief -- it was not our oak -- then gasped. It was not our oak; it was our neighbor's huge hickory, torn out of the ground and split lengthwise. Two homes were destroyed -- our neighbor's house, and the hawks' nest.

I have pages of notes and several drafts of poems about the hawks, but I wanted to try to tell the whole story in one poem. I was inspired by Violet Nesdoly's extended haiku about the storm, and wanted to try that form. Violet explains, "I call this an extended haiku but perhaps it isn’t one by an official definition (which I couldn’t find). Anyway, what’s happening here is that each word in the original haiku becomes the beginning word in successive haiku. It’s a fun challenge."

At the Choice Literacy writer's retreat this week, we had a minilesson on using a B-C-B-A narrative structure in our article writing. (A = near future, B = present, C = past.) When I looked back at my first draft of this poem, I realized that I had intuitively used at least a version of this structure, shifting back and forth in time. I added the four Acts to help the reader transition between the different "chapters" of the story.

One of the hardest things about this form is that first haiku. You need rich words with which to start each of the successive haikus, and which allow you to tell your story. As with all writing, the last hard thing is a strong ending. I struggled with the ending, but Violet was gracious enough to read my draft and give me some writerly nudges. Thank you, Violet!

Bibliophile has the roundup this week at Life is Better With Books.