According to a report, the discovery of a rock-fossil of a hawk has
considerably intrigued both geologists and ornithologists. A well-known
bird-watcher disclosed that the sea coast where the fossil was found was at
least a hundred miles away from 'hawk country'. (News item.)

The heel-talon led him on to this
and pride that he could hook the bird-kingdom
to his claw. Air currents hissed;

he felt their funnels spraying his down
with streaming cold. He slipped into a sleeve of air
which lifted him; buoyant now he took his rounds.

Then breaking spiral and ring,
lean of body, he banked, climbing
in an arc on still, nonchalant wings.

Peering for prey, his eyes bored
through space, till a salt-rinse of air
hit him, and the cavernous roar,

as of a subway train. It was
the sea in high tide. His eye
took in the heavens in one scouting look.
He had come to the wrong sky.

This was the world of gull and cormorant
spiking the crabs under the whipped froth
of the tide. He couldn't plan

his strikes here. The storm came ere he could map
the country. The perch of air beneath him
wobbled; the fulcrum snapped.

The storm left its litter, dinghies turned to planks,
a debris of masts, shattered hulls.
He lay there on the rocks with strange yet kindred birds;
a stew of herons, an embankment of dead gulls.

The first rains covered him with their scum;
bracken, toadstool and moss clothed him
to the cricket's litany and the dragonfly's hum.

And while winter birds and Aryans
migrated, a rock took him in its lap
mother-fashion, and a millennium

was card-indexed here. From head to hooked feet
you're there, entombed in nature's masonry;
older than Pharaoh, older than mummy-wheat,

yet pliant as chalk in your mutations. Now you shift
from predator-bird to preyed-upon fossil,
witness to a glacier-slow geological drift.

You should have been alive today, right here
while the Arabs are around. You would be preening
on the wrist of a royal falconer.

A tent-city has sprung up in the desert scrub. Sentries tramp
around, generators drone, ministers wait on the Sheikh.
The smell of roasts draws wild-life near the camp.

There are deep-freeze vans, stacked with quail and snipe,
that move in with the hunt. Bins are littered
with beaks and slit wind-pipes.

Festoons, buntings, the simulacra of a reception,
and good wishes: 'May Your Majesties get many bastards.'
His lips, curling like lambswool, belie deception.

The small bustard is clever, he knows the kestrel
is aloft, dawn-sniffing; manoeuvres with half-wing flaps
and evades both hawk and the printer's devil.

Not so the Great Indian bustard (poor bugger,
often mispronounced), he can't cope with the attack.
He flies in the hawk's shadow, till falling shadow
and hawk meet rasping on his back.

You don't need effort here, you merely descend
when dogs flush out the game, and if it lunges
for cover, the Sheikh himself will bend

and serve you the bird. But it's dusk and the Sheikh claps;
low whistles follow; the trainer looks up and cries
as if speaking to Allah. The falcons fall
into a lowering gyre and leave the skies.

The dark hood falls and obscures the view.
As the scrub returns to its solitude and crickets,
accept, as token, this requiem for you.