You dream you would hammer
your scorn into perfect circles
from on high like the iron wheels
of a predatory night hawk.
You would prey on any
isosceles triangle within grip,
rip it into angles of judgment
as acute as a golden eagle’s cocked eye.
Your shadow would be as a vulture’s
mean and dirty parallelogram
in the raw morning sky.
But, you wake instead,
the spoiled caged cockatoo,
clip-winged, inside a square
of domesticity
on a low bamboo perch
of limited horizons,
squawking white with resentment.
Life did not let you fly
into wild cones of power.
Karla Linn Merrifield, a nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artist-in-Residence, has had 600+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 12 books to her credit, the newest of which is Bunchberries, More Poems of Canada, a sequel toGodwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills), which received the Eiseman Award for Poetry. Forthcoming this fall is Psyche’s Scroll, a full-length poem, published by The Poetry Box Selects. She is assistant editor and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye. Visit her blog, Vagabond Poe Redux, athttp://karlalinn.blogspot.com. Google her name to learn more; Tweet @LinnMerrifiel;https://www.facebook.com/karlalinn.merrifield.