Hawk and Cardinal, by David Huddle

Hawk and Cardinal, photography by David Huddle (USA). Contemporary.

Hawk and Cardinal

One  of  the  several  billion  deaths  that occurred  yesterday, 
this one more seemly than most, the photograph appalled me
after  I   realized   the  victim  was  a  cardinal. I  put   it   away,
but I  kept on seeing  it until this morning  when  the  memory
nagged  me  into  looking again. For  years  now  I’ve fed birds
in my backyard, photographed them, savored the pretty ones
like   this  lifeless   female.   This   hawk  is   just   another  bird
I’ve  fed--  this  is  how  I think  now that I  see how she turns
from what she’s killed. Dead means more to me now that I’m
well beyond my three score and ten and my mind lets me see
my human body face up, eyes closed, arms splayed out, limp
and absent from the world, senses discontinued permanently.
The  lesson   here  is   that  there  is  no  lesson.  The  world  is
is  both  cruel and kind.  Right  now  I  take  comfort  from this.

​David Huddle

David Huddle teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English and in the Rainier Writing Workshop.  His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Poetry, Shenandoah, Agni, Plume, The Hollins Critic, and The Georgia Review.  His most recent books are Dream Sender, a poetry collection, and My Immaculate Assassin, a novel.  With Meighan Sharp, Huddle has co-authored a book of poems, Effusive Greetings to Friends, forthcoming from Groundhog Poetry Press in the fall of 2017, and his new novel, Hazel, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2018. ​