The Seakhawks unload on Green Bay
Sports Saturday
Many people are predicting that the Seattle Seahawks will be the first team since the Patriots to win back-to-back Super Bowls, and Thursday night’s drubbing of a good Green Bay team appears promising in this regard. Here’s a poem about a hawk unleashing its “legion of boom” upon the other birds at a bird feeder. Imagine them as the other NFL teams.
Here’s the thing about the NFL, however. Like those other birds, the other teams will learn to adjust, and the mayhem we anticipate Seattle causing won’t necessarily continue on. They will weather Seattle’s attacks, at least somewhat, “scattering into the thinning trees” and then reassembling. Not all of them will have their necks snapped like the junco. They will regroup to eat their small measure in the fading light of Sunday afternoons.
Feeding the Birds
By Robert Cording
I wanted to do something
After the sharp-shinned hawk
Swept through my utopia
Of feeders–each one filled
With seeds for all kinds
Of birds–and snapped the neck
Of a junco pecking about
On the ground, content to eat
(or so it seemed) what fell
From the beaks of purple finches.
For weeks my two-year-old had
Named cardinal and goldfinch,
Chickadee, titmouse, nuthatch,
The feeders gathering them
From the reddening maples
Where starved leaves drifted away
From their branches, nights colder,
The sky rehearsing for winter.
I’d often sit at the window,
Pleased by the way goldfinches
Yellowed the air as they waited
For their turn or purple finches
Dropped from the shed roof
One after another. Even the jays–
Over-sized, bullying, loud-mouthed–
Were kept in check: enough
For all, they ate their fill
And left. And then the hawk came,
Took up residence, perching
On the electric wires, and waited
For those moments when, unwary,
Trusting my simple paradise,
A fattened junco might forget
Its instinct for shadows in the sun.
I thought of banging on windows,
A saving alarm, though
I could never be quite sure
Of that brief, startling moment
When, sweeping down from the air,
The hawk would choose to change
The balance at the feeder.
In the end, I did nothing.
The birds learned to save themselves.
In time they grew accustomed
To what is and isn’t possible,
Accepting, it seemed, the random
Attacks with poise and equanimity,
Scattering into the thinning trees
And then regrouping, one by one,
To eat their small measure
Those afternoons of fading light.
