My new poetry collection, Gods of Water and Air, will be released by Kelsay Books in the fall of this year. A mix of poems, prose poems, essays, and even a short play, it will be an homage to the forces that grew me and sustain me: the ocean’s edge, the people shaped by this landscape, our history, and above all love’s failures and victories. Death’s failure to erase it. It is really a book of odes to these daily gods. Thank you, Karen Kelsay, for selecting it and giving me such scope to finish it! Here’s a sample:
O Beautiful
As we pull up and park at Point Reyes,
a woman lowers
her binoculars,
and points: Eagle!
We raise our glasses and scan
the hills, see a white-headed fledgling
standing on a ridge, outstretched
wings sieving the wind.
His pharaonic beaked head
turns slowly. Through trembling
lenses, we watch the Golden
Quarter come alive–
O, beautiful
Descending to the estuary,
we leave behind his practice flights,
as he hoists up, free-falls and strikes.
His freedom is law-forged.
He’s a leashed kite
tethered to this range
where a few more eagles
nest each year, their circles
pruning shore and sky.
At the Lindsay Wildlife Hospital,
a tethered eagle hops atop a cage.
His broken wing created a captivity
where he’ll live longer
than his cliff-roaming
cousins. He flaps
in tight
circles,
snapping
his wings’ dark flags.
We stand back,
doubting the chain
as he puzzles us
with a hard black eye.
originally published in Terrain
Visit https://racheldacus.net for more information and writing by Rachel Dacus.