The love of a mother—vast, silent, unyielding—
lives most profoundly in the instant of its rupture,
when the hawk, wings arched against the pale light,
descends with precision, claws curved toward the inevitable.
There is no time for words, no time for the illusions
that comfort us in our smaller griefs. Only this—
a swift shadow, a scream swallowed by the wind.
And what do we do with this?
We make it a story, give it shape and weight,
calling the hawk a villain, the child a victim,
and ourselves witnesses to a cruelty too grand to bear.
We name the mother’s pain as if it could be bounded,
as if naming could make sense of the ache
that reverberates through time, through marrow,
into the deep well of all that has ever suffered.
But the hawk knows no malice.
Its hunger is ancient, its talons guided
not by choice, but by a force we cannot deny.
And as much as we recoil from the scene,
we see ourselves reflected in its sharp arcs,
our lives shaped by the same unseen hands,
our breath as fragile as any we mourn.
Still, we resist.
The civilized mind demands justice,
a softer world where no creature must fall
so another can rise. We imagine it,
a world unmarked by the shadow of loss,
a universe reshaped in the image of our yearning,
where love rules and death is an aberration.
But this, too, falters.
For how can there be life without the hawk’s hunger?
How can there be love without the mother’s cries?
If we spare the heron, do we starve the hawk?
If we shelter the weak, do we weaken the whole?
These are not questions to be answered,
but wounds to be carried,
etched into the fabric of what it means to exist.
In the quiet after the storm,
I see the threads as they truly are,
woven in patterns too vast to comprehend,
the hawk, the heron, the mother, and I
bound by the same relentless order.
No one escapes the weave;
no one stands apart from the rhythm.
This is not a cold truth,
though it feels that way in the telling.
It is love in its rawest form,
unconditioned, unflinching,
a force that does not comfort but sustains.
To wish for another way is to wish for unbeing,
to unravel the bonds that tether us to each other,
to the earth, to the great silence between the stars.
And so, I stand, watching the hawk rise
and the heron fall,
my heart heavy with the weight of all I cannot change,
yet fuller, somehow, for having borne witness.