WIAO P-15; ITD-3, A Poet Gambols on Hawks

Speaking of hawks, last autumn, Beverly and I traveled to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in Connecticut. The rural road we were driving on through the New England countryside came to an end before a great complex of a gambling casino owned by that same Pequot tribe. Foxwoods Casino. It floated in the distance like a great glass dream. And almost every car on the road was rolling towards it.

Now I have this point of view I’m sure that others share. The surviving Indians of the 21st century are making war on those that visit such places, and one they are deservedly winning. All wars are fought over power, and there’s no greater power in this America than money. And there’s a lot of it being lost in those establishments. And it’s not the Pequot suffering defeat this time.

As such, any battleground is sacred but dangerous space. Which we were entering, innocents with all good intentions of witnessing another way of life lived in harmony and peace. Suddenly a hawk swooped down towards my car, passing close before my windshield, and stayed there, right above us, until we passed by all the access roads to the casino. Nothing out of the ordinary, right? Just another hawk hovering extremely close above a car. That’s one face. Or you could see an escort guiding someone safely past the battle. That’s the other face.

And that’s the one I’ve been choosing the past year and more. It’s all the same in many ways. Life is the dream we make of it. One can dream a Christian. One can dream in Islam. One can dream a zen-like dream that’s not a dream at all. So lately I’ve been dreaming in signs. But then again, as a poet, I’ve been working with metaphor for a long, long time.