Your Sunday Poem

Often, in spring, as I drive along Highway One between SLO and Morro Bay, I’ll see buzzards perched on the phone poles, their wings akimbo, soaking up the early morning sun. And always, everywhere, the buzzards soaring, wheeling, riding the thermals, looking for lunch. This poem by Mary Oliver, from her book “American Primitive.”

VULTURES

Like large dark
lazy
butterflies they sweep over
the glades looking
for death,
to eat it,
to make it vanish,
to make of it the miracle:
Resurrection. No one
knows how many
they are who daily
minister so to the grassy
miles, no one
counts how many bodies
they discover
and descend to, demonstrating
each time the earth’s
appetite, the unending
waterfalls of change.
no one, moreover, wants to ponder it,
how it will be
to feel the blood cool,
shapeliness dissolve.
Locked into
the blaze of our own bodies
we watch them
wheeling and drifting, we
honor them and we
loathe them,
however wise the doctrine,
however magnificent the cycles,
however ultimately sweet
the huddle of death to fuel
those powerful wings.