Rara Avis in Terris

for Helen

Hawks are in the ascendant. Just look about.
Cormorants, ravens, jailbirds of ominous wing
Befoul the peace, their caws
raised in some summoning
To an eviscerating cause,
Some jihad, some rash all-get-out
Crusade, leaving the field all gore and guano
Justified in hysterical soprano

By balding buzzards who brandish the smart bomb,
The fractured atom in their unclipped talons.
Ruffling with all the pride
of testosteronic felons,
They storm the airwaves with implied
Threats and theatrical aplomb
Or cruise the sky with delta stealth and gelid
Chestsful of combat-decorative fruit salad.

It’s the same in the shady groves of academe:
Cold eye and primitive beak and callused foot
Conjunctive to destroy
all things of high repute,
Whole epics, Campion’s songs, Tolstoy,
Euclid and logic’s enthymeme,
As each man bares his scalpel, whets his saber,
As though enjoined to deconstruct his neighbor.

And that’s not the worst of it; there are the Bacchae,
The ladies’ auxiliary of the raptor clan
With their bright cutlery,
sororal to a man.
And feeling peckish, they foresee
An avian banquet in the sky,
Feasting off dead white European male,
Or local living ones, if all else fails.

But where are the mild monogamous lovebirds,
Parakeets, homing pigeons, sundry doves,
Beringed, bewitching signs
of the first, greatest loves
Eros or Agape gently defines?
God’s for the ark’s small flocks and herds,
Or Venus incarnate as that quasi-queen
Of France known as Diane de la Poitrine.

They are here, my dear, they are here in the marble air,
According to the micro-Mosaic law,
Miraculously aloft
above that flood and flaw
Where Noah darkly plies his craft.
Lightly an olive branch they bear,
Its deathless leafage emblematic of
A quarter-century of faultless love.