Not Seeing Talon or Beak

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit.

                                                                                            Audre Lorde

The pistols glinted in the moonlight

pouring through the trees by the bike path

as two men robbed my son and his friend.

One gun pressed into his friend's temple

as he lay face-down on the ground;

the other pointed at my son's chest. He obeyed:

slipped off his backpack, emptied 

his pockets, handed the taller man his chapstick

and his phone, which, minutes before,

had sent the message, On my way, to me.

He knelt down and turned his back when asked,

as one might before uttering a prayer,

the universal gesture of supplication.

In the grass, damp with dew, he prepared

for the closing of night, the silencing

of tree frogs, but the gunshot never

arrived. Instead the men ordered them

to run away, and so they ran, hearts glad

to be pounding louder than their footsteps

like bass drums at some celebratory parade

all the way home. Later, telling the story,

he says he imagined as he ran the desperation

of those men -- Not much older than me! --

that pushed them into a life like that.

Like a rabbit looking up at the hawk

and not seeing talon or beak,

but the soft underside of the wing.

Heather Swan, Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Consolation, James Crews and Ted Kooser, eds. (Green Writers Press, 2019)