Death made the meadow darken in my eyes:
a squirrel in the talons of a hawk,
snatched from a maple, soundless in surprise,
today met its demise.
While I looked up in shock,
my mutts, paws on the planet, didn’t see
the silhouette, whose pinions loomed as huge
as a cumulonimbus cloud against a sea
of blue above the tree
that functions as refuge
from creatures, fanged, which squirrels could elude
as easily as finches can take flight
and chortle at the world. But now as food
and gaining altitude,
the squirrel seemed as light
as wind. The bird, wings rigid as a jet’s,
sailed straight across the field into a copse.
And that’s the last I saw of it. My pets,
who plainly are no threats
to rodents in treetops,
sniffed shrubbery, chased chipmunks, ran around
like preschoolers preoccupied in play,
endowed with limbs that fly as fast as sound
across this grim playground
of predator and prey.