Hadley Hury’s most recent poem to appear here was “Acting at the Ice Cream Parlor” (April 2017)

In the Wild
By Hadley Hury

Sitting this evening in our screened back-porch
this last week of June we cannot escape
apparently momentous events in the lives
of our red-shouldered hawks.

Their shrieking Why? Why? Why? over
and over and over again unsettles us
with a perceived edge of hysteria, though our next-door neighbor
tells us her that call to the local Raptor Society was reassuring.

It’s something that may be expected in early summer—
a mother telling her fledgling what’s what,
or perhaps a couple scouting for a new abode
or reasserting a territorial claim.

Our quiet urban neighborhood in this old river town
is hilly and treed and no stranger
to all sorts of birds, rabbits, and occasional deer
who graze through the gentle green ravines and hedgerows.

For the past five days, though, the hawks’ exotic cries—
above the other birds and for long minutes at a time—
have charged the air like a wild and misted rainforest instead
of a gently upcurving street with Dutch Colonials and chocolate Labs.

So we hope our neighbor has it right—
that there is no distress, only the noisy business
of child-raising or relocation—
and we lift our drinks to them.

What kind of neighbors would we be to read
some free-floating existential angst into
their insistent capacity for transforming a few of our
Kentucky twilights into something like Costa Rica or Belize?