The Life So Short...
and larks rising out of dead grass and lambs antiphonal between rocky outcrops and the discreet one-note charm of the willow warbler wishing itself into invisibility between sally trees where desperate with its own single-mind intent the yellow-eyed red-tail kite (still an edgy fledgling) prepares to put into lethal play its own unforgiving art by twitching one nervous feather after another in the precious seconds before lift-off
Credit
Copyright © 2014 by Eamon Grennan. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on February 5, 2014. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
About this Poem
“Most of the details in this little poem were simply notations from a summer walk I took out in Connemara in the West of Ireland where I live when I can. The birds are local, all except the red-tail kite, which was re-introduced into Ireland in 2007, when I read about it. I wanted it for the ‘lethal play’ to contrast with the other ‘pastoral’ details.”
—Eamon Grennan
Date Published
02/05/2014