[R. S. Gwynn]

The Bateleur

She was returning to the gauntlet when
some dolt yee-hawed a horn. She slewed left, fetched
off course, alarmed, towards the misty fen.
I heard the sharp cries of the crowd, and stretched
my ungloved wrist out wide. She landed there
as softly as a stork re-sits its nest.
She gazed at me and I absorbed her stare.
She preened her wind-combed quills, then came to rest
sphinx-still, her eyes a blaze of feral gold.
The handler bustled up to break the charm.
He mentioned luck, unlocked her talon-hold,
and claimed the eagle from my unscathed arm.
Between her wingbeats, Nature spurned the rule
that beauty shows no mercy to a fool.

The title sent me to google.com, so I'm glad to know this bird-word. The poem works pretty well, though it does more or less move by fits and starts. It's a sonnet in form but not in structure, with the exception of the couplet, which is rigidly sonnetesque (to coin a word). I wish there were a bit more variety in sentence structure--five sentences, all relatively short, beginning with "She." Otherwise, it's a striking poem on a subject I?ve never seen handled (if I may) before.

[Tim Murphy]

Sam's making me take a harder look at poems that I am a sucker for. I reacted so positively to this when it was posted because I adore birds of prey, and because it has a last line to die for. But I agree that all those "She" sentences are a problem. Here's a poem about birds of prey and Sam Gwynn from Very Far North:

Hunting Time
for R. S. Gwynn

It’s not just dirt-cheap prices,
diseases in our herds
or the global banking crisis.
Our fields are beset by birds.
Gwynn slips in a cartridge,
and another shell is pinned—
poets and dogs and partridge
all working into the wind.

The raptor is our fellow
predator of the air.
We humans lack his yellow
iris, his slitted stare;
but Brownings are as deadly
as dripping beak or claw,
and our prey bleeds as redly
as rodent eaten raw.

Though nowadays a shooter
keeps impulse under lock,
my old Kentucky tutor
once shot and stuffed a hawk.
He told me time was reckoned
by the crippled bird’s last breath
as the marksman spared a second
to practice for his death.

I think in reaching for the killer-diller close, I over-reach, and that this sonnet ends better. On the other hand, I think I'm closer to the Red Tail Hawk than this author is to the Bateleur.

[Janet Kenny]

I have read this and think I know who wrote it but I'm not game to say. I am at once pleased and displeased by the lurching meter. It does illustrate the alarm of the bird. I'm not quite sure that ",fetched" works out there on its own in line 2. But I'm not sure that it doesn't either.

I love lines 8 and 9

Janet

The Bateleur

She was returning to the gauntlet when
some dolt yee-hawed a horn. She slewed left, fetched
off course, alarmed, towards the misty fen.
I heard the sharp cries of the crowd, and stretched
my ungloved wrist out wide. She landed there
as softly as a stork re-sits its nest.
She gazed at me and I absorbed her stare.
She preened her wind-combed quills, then came to rest
sphinx-still, her eyes a blaze of feral gold.
The handler bustled up to break the charm.
He mentioned luck, unlocked her talon-hold,
and claimed the eagle from my unscathed arm.
Between her wingbeats, Nature spurned the rule
that beauty shows no mercy to a fool.