To The Turkey Vulture Pacing The Field
       

The field has been cut for hay,
though not yet baled,
and you have noticed—

your wide-winged shadow a haunt
on this sheet of midday gold:
a revenant undeterred by light.

I must say, now that you have landed,
you look less impressive on your feet—
awkward as a potato sauntering through the straw,
more turkey than vulture as you nose the earth.

You must have found what you are
looking for because you have stopped—

some mouse, mole, or cottontail kit.
They must have felt safe in their green
cathedral—vaulted ceilings of seed-weighted grass—
until they could not escape
the tractor's indifferent thrash.

These carrion do not feel
you rip their skin, your bald head
burrowing into bowel,
or your beak breaking bone.

You have waited, as you always do,
for the stillness and breathless bloat—
and, in this, I think

perhaps you are kinder
than your feather-crowned kin who kill
and bleed their fear-choked prey in flight.

But you, eater of the departed,
you have finished your quiet meal where it rests
and have again taken flight, casting
that same earthbound specter—

though now you seem less
ominous, less mysterious,
and not so different
from the rest of us

with your belly full of dead things
and your endless hungry search.

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Copyright © 2019 Benjamin Cutler All rights reserved
from Pembroke Magazine
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission