by Bruce E. R. Thompson.
I saw a Texas buzzard once—a squalid bird;
wings dipped in entrails; its gaze alert for thievings;
salvaging what it could of the desert’s leavings;
picking through the discarded and the disinterred;
wearing winter plumage out of season. Absurd
to watch it stagger, legs to short and neck too long;
a disheveled, wretched bag-lady of a bird.
But then it leaped and rose, as gracefully as song,
above the sand and thistle in a thermal plume,
until it turned away, wafting through the Texas air.
Now I see Mrs. Alice Johnson sitting there,
her bags beside her in this public reading room.
In her mind, as she reads poems of Old Madrid,
I ‘spect she soars as sweetly as that buzzard did.