March 2019
Lee Passarella
leepassarella@comcast.net
leepassarella@comcast.net
I live in Lawrenceville, a town just north of Atlanta, where I work as a tech writer. Beside poetry, the love of my artistic life is classical music, and though I don’t play an instrument anymore, I do write music reviews for Audiophile Audition. My poetry has appeared in Chelsea, Cream City Review, and Journal of the American Medical Association. Please visit my website, http://leepassarella.net/, for a sampling of my work.
A Young Hawk’s Fancy
Whitman got it wrong in “Dalliance
of Eagles.” No lovey tête-à-tête. Instead,
an avian battle cry. So much for reliance
on gut (or heart) instincts. No need for red-
faced admissions, though; poetic license
works for me. And besides, today, in dead
of winter, the real thing: dalliance
of hawks. They wheeled on wintry gusts and screee-d,
then landed in a pine tree, an alliance
sixty feet above. All thoughts of greed,
the cruelty of man I packed away,
Walt, and thought of spring—February wet
and cold behind, a different sort of day,
a very different sun, about to set.
Whitman got it wrong in “Dalliance
of Eagles.” No lovey tête-à-tête. Instead,
an avian battle cry. So much for reliance
on gut (or heart) instincts. No need for red-
faced admissions, though; poetic license
works for me. And besides, today, in dead
of winter, the real thing: dalliance
of hawks. They wheeled on wintry gusts and screee-d,
then landed in a pine tree, an alliance
sixty feet above. All thoughts of greed,
the cruelty of man I packed away,
Walt, and thought of spring—February wet
and cold behind, a different sort of day,
a very different sun, about to set.
© 2019 Lee Passarella
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