Hawk Dream

The trouble with poems, besides being booooooooooring, is that they are usually unrelentingly long. The last epic poem that I enjoyed was the Iliad and the Odyssey and that was because it was an illustrated book and one arrow shoots through 12 axe-heads. 

The shorter the poem, the better chance someone will enjoy it. Show me a guy or a gal who doesn't like a good 5 line poem about Nantucket.

If the above lines had been organ music, they would have been called "messing round music." That is what Mrs. Betty Wishart, church organist for the Bayshore Baptist Church in Tampa Florida, called the music that she played while the sinners were filing in before the service.

Now that we have enough messing around content to make the 400 minimum words, we can now get to the sermon, I mean poem:

Hawk Dream

Dan doused the campfire and scanned for the flight
Of a lone hawk he had seen at first light.

He had studied the Falcon since the early dawn
Gliding on updrafts near canyon wall and beyond.

The hawk had floated, hovered, and soared all day.
A connection crept over Dan. Envy slipped away.

"God, I wish I could fly," said Dan out loud.
"But only in dreams can I circle a cloud."

He piled his sleeping bag in the back of his Jeep.
40 years old, it was just an old heap.

But it took him from the city and into the wild.
Camping was the only time he ever really smiled.

He hated his job and he hated his life
And if he had married, he would have hated his wife.

But out in the open, in nature alone
He felt lucky to be living, happy to be home.

He could fish, he could hunt, but most of all hunger
To be free as that hawk, like when he was younger.

He would catch a warm current and not beat a wing.
He could claw at a rabbit or herald in spring.

Still, tomorrow was work and he couldn't stay here,
So he jumped in the Jeep and put her in gear.

He rode over the trail, looking back in time
To see the dignified hawk starting a climb.

He watched the bird build to a heavenly height
And fade to a fleck in its mythical flight.

Dan faced the road straight ahead to Monday
"Maybe I can dream that I will fly...someday."

Late in the day as dark took the sky
When only owls reigned and rodents could die

In the aerie above the canyon wall steep
That night the hawk dreamed he was driving a Jeep.