Hawks

Surely, you too have longed for this --
to pour yourself out
on the rising circles of the air
to ride, unthinking,
on the flesh of emptiness.

Can you claim, in your civilized life,
that you have never leaned toward
the headlong dive, the snap of bones,
the chance to be so terrible,
so free from evil, beyond choice?

The air that they are riding
is the same breath as your own.
How could you not remember?
That same swift stillness binds
your cells in balance, rushes
through the pulsing circles of your blood.

Each breath proclaims it --
the flash of feathers, the chance to rest
on such a muscled quietness,
to be in that fierce presence,
wholly wind, wholly wild.

~ Lynn Ungar ~

(Blessing the Bread)

This is the poem published on today's Panhala. (To subscribe to Panhala, send a blank email to Panhala-subscribe@yahoogroups.com ) I post it because I also own the book from which it is drawn. Ungar is a poet worth reading, in my opinion.

How do we come to the idea that we can bury our "unacceptable" feelings? How can we find the healthy expression of our desire to be wild and terrible in ways so free from evil? Yesterday my friend and I were talking about miscarriage, how the body takes over and says, "No." The choice that is not really our choice. Is this the wild and terrible? Part of is, surely. Just as going into labor at any time, even at term, is a wild and terrible thing. And sex. And how we meet all our hungers. Are you a vegetarian? If not, which animals are you eating? If yes, do you imagine the food you are eating does not have life? Do we not take our own life from other life?

How can we forget that with every breath we exchange air, and that air links the world?

Are we so small in our understanding that we no longer notice that the world is all one piece? When did we start imagining that God is created in the human image? How can we stop imagining that what humans are able to know will someday define all Mystery?

There is an old book by the Bible translator J.B. Phillips titled Your God Is Too Small, and he expounds on his theme, but the title really says it all.

Ah, let me go out in the day and be blessed with the chance to observe a hawk. Or, lacking that, let me be blessed by considering the Ungar poem.