[Un-]Collared Doves

every time Mum sets the seed

under the magnolia tree, she will 

count the collared doves that used

to visit: one time we had four, but 

now there’s only three. One summer

they found a head unzipped from 

the collar up. A little beige cap

of dove between magnolia 

blossoms. 

    I thought then 

we might have a sparrowhawk. 

A squat, orange-bearded druid, mad bursting

through the preacher’s gate with the sudden 

silent whack of the beak’s guillotine, 

of the moment’s memory of wings 

- hollow as thunder -

terse with the bloodlust of the altar. 

Beneath his furrowed brows, impact is ritual: 

druid’s sickled toe carves dove into daylight prayers, 

intestinal scriptures unbind around the sundial, 

unmapping valleys of dove under the vile

purple shade of the blooming wisteria. It is barely 

done and the altar’s bloody petrichor 

censers this hallowed murder scene, of

hawk on dove on holy granite pebble,

beneath the guiltless gaze of hunter. 

        In the crazed 

depths of his jaundiced eye exist a

higher expansive terror we share, as if in 

my watchings were the shadow of a jackdaw 

and in his, my own staring eyes. 

With the panic of a bird hollow 

and snappable as balsa, sparrowhawk

folds under the treeline, owns 

the buoyant limp of a fullness,

almost too much of it to take to air,

heavy with the flesh of prayers.