Ekphrastics: Rough-legged Hawk
The rough-legged hawk soars in the summer sky,
the soft breeze, one hundred feet up, is cool,
and there, in the corner of the hawk's eye,
is a rabbit in the yard of a school.
The hawk swoops down into the green school yard,
its talons out reaching for the rabbit,
it catches the rabbit, breaks its neck, hard,
and drinks the rabbit's blood out of habit.
Poor rabbit, it will not be going back
to its house and its little kid bunnies,
the hawk broke his neck with a nasty clack,
now he'll never see his rabbit hunnies.
hawk eating rabbit is the way it goes,
it is simply the way that nature flows.
Ekphrastics: Sweet Water to Salt
Sweet water winds its way through a small brook
over a cliff, making a waterfall
in every crevice and in every nook
is life: algae, fish, ducks and birds and all
the rest. From the waterfall another
river forms which flows into the ocean,
a sea of salt water. This is Mother
Nature at work: everything in motion,
everything connected to everything
else, the sun over the sea creates clouds
which create rain which feeds river and spring
again. All through the system there are crowds
of mammals and insects and birds who live
in the ecosystem the waters give.
Ekphrastics: Teeming
The seas and skies were once so full of life
that you were able to cross rivers on
the backs of turtles, you could stick a knife
into the air a pull down lunch: the brawn
of Mother Nature in full swing, but then
something happened, bison no longer roamed
by the millions throughout the plains and glen,
the sky no longer a quilt of birds homed
in North America. Europeans
came here and tried to tame the wild world with
gun and axe, singing praises in paeans
until all life in the wild was one fifth
of what it was when they first arrived here,
hewing the forests that we now hold dear.
Ekphrastics: Quorum Sensing
The great auks are now just a memory,
at one time numbering in the millions,
herded into pen and aviary
by the thousands by hungry civilians.
The extinction of the great auks was first
among the animals that man would drive
to extinction. An incredible thirst
for down, meat, and fist bait and we arrive
where we are today: no more great auks for
us to admire with their silly waddle
and penguin's gait. No more down, and no more
bird meat. They exist now as a model
in museums and private collections:
the result of no hunting directions.
Ekphrastics: Gilt Frames
An ornate gilt frame crops a vast ocean
void of ice and polar bears and penguins.
the undulation of waves, the motion
back and forth. The melting of ice lengthens
the distance that polar bears need to go
in order to find its food and a place
to stay and hunt. There are no packs of snow
free from the effects of warming. A race
of bears will soon go extinct for a lack
intervention on the part of people
and industry. Regulations too slack
to be effective and a medieval
attitude toward animals and earth:
how much industry are living things worth?
"Five Poems" by Kenneth Larot Yamat
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