For Wednesday in Holy Week, The New York Sun continues its selection of poems read by living poets. Here the Sun’s associate poetry editor, Sally Thomas, reads “Hawks in Holy Week,” a portion of a longer work. Author of the poetry collection “Motherland” and co-editor of the forthcoming “Christian Poetry in America Since 1940,” Ms. Thomas uses a Welsh form known as gwawdodyn hir: a sestet of varying syllabic lines, rhymed aaaaba, with the b rhyme repeated in a syllable in the last line of the stanza — all to speak of Tenebrae, the dying away of the light, and a hawk’s eye cast on the world.

Hawks in Holy Week
by Sally Thomas

On this new morning of threatened rain—
Every spring is like this—again
Birds call in the brevity between
Distant thunderings. A silence, then 
A hilarity of song. Death and life
Have contended. Small, the old strife goes on 

Repeating itself. Camellias
Pulse red, red, red, red, insistent as
My own blood, pulled riverlike to seas
It never reaches in this world. Has
A Holy Week ever felt so storm-pressed? 
I can’t remember last year. When it does

Begin raining in earnest, so that
The only song’s the insistent pat
On shining camellia leaves, what
Story does it tell? The end? Exit
God? On Good Friday night, at Tenebrae,  
Light dies away. New light steals in, quiet,

Almost unannounced. Only unseen,
In the sacristy, a clatter, one
Dropped sound, as of a tomb-sealing stone
Not rolled but shattered, the dead man gone
Out of the world and softly returning
On wounded feet, burning. His flame again

Pierces the dark, as the redtail’s cry
Draws its talons down the louring sky,
And everything stills. Stooping, that eye
Marks the mourning dove, the brash bluejay
That starts from cover. Once the storm weather
Clears, I’ll find feathers scattered, blue or gray,

Across the grass. I’ll see again how
The world keeps remaking itself, show
And tell, today, always. Hand, meet plow. 
Plow, meet furrow. Raptor, prey. Allow
These ends. In them something begins. Hawk,
Look down. In your eye, all of us are now. 

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by the Sun’s poetry editor, Joseph Bottum of Dakota State University, with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, The Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.