Feeding
(Original Version)
The turkey vultures, from your front porch,
glide through the cool morning air,
majestic, mysterious, five of them
circling -- some carcass in their sights.
From your front porch you can’t tell
they’re vultures -- they could be ravens,
crows, if you squint -- perhaps bald eagles.
So graceful their group dancing
in the blue morning sky until you
look down to slap a green fly on
your bare calf, hit it with the
practiced swat of a killer tired of
the pests of summer -- the only reason
you’re on the front porch is the
mosquitos on your back porch smelled
your blood before you even sat back there,
book and coffee in hand. So out on
the less used front porch where a
neighbor mows across the street and
a car drives past -- another soul going
somewhere -- you see these scavengers
circling, narrowing the
distance between predator and prey
until you look up from the fly
lying on its back, one wing crushed upon
contact with the same hand that now
grasps this pen to write and you
wonder what the vultures feed on,
what tearing of stale flesh gives
them sustenance, the energy to soar
until sated, until hunger returns
and they sense another dead thing
upon which to feed.
Feeding
(Re(En)Visioned)
They glide through cool morning air – five buzzards
soaring circles, surveying fields for prey.
From here they could be eagles arced forward:
gallant symbols of might, not of decay.
These bone-picking birds are no one’s favorite,
yet they kill nothing, their purpose is clear.
While I watch how tightly their loop is knit,
a high-pitched buzzing draws near to my ear.
The slight black body fools no one – this blood
sucker lands on my arm its tube feeding;
I raise my right hand, swatting it dead,
my own blood with that hand now is smearing.
And the next day on the porch where she lay
wispy corpse whisked away, death made her prey.
© 2020 Kathy Cable Smaltz
Kathy Smaltz served as Prince William County’s Poet Laureate from 2016-2018. Her first collection of poetry, Pieces, was released in the Fall of 2019 by Piedmont Press.
