Without Me

Grass shakes on an open valley.  It is a century
until my birth, in that linoleum-clad hospital.

Raptors head south, towards the Gulf, aloft
on thermals, scanning the dark ridges for

clusters of smaller birds.  At the headwaters
of a river of rocks, a dozen hunters, their

shotguns poised, take down a hundred hawks
an hour, and the stones mottle from granite

grey to blood-brown stone.  Feathers and flesh
clump and aggregate, shimmer in an angry

wind.  Elsewhere a buffalo slumps, in a field
across the continent, another bullet finding

its straight course home, another hunter
hopeful for blood and meat and bread.