Living in Black and White

by Katherine West

The red tail
Cuts across
Pink cliffs
Sun picking up
Its colors—
Rust, brown
Flash of silver-white
Just like the winter bushes
It flies above—
Fox colors
Following the river

And beneath the hawk
Its black shadow
Also cutting across
The fairy tale
Castle turrets
Of sandstone—
Our new home
Where we watch
At the window
As the shadow
Pendulums
Once
Twice
Three times
Before diving
For its prey

We lean out
Searching
For the hawk itself—
The mythic
Original—
But the sun
Blinds us—
We are not used to it
So we retreat
Return to weaving
Our memory
Of color

Katherine West is the author of three collections of poetry and one novel, Scimitar Dreams, The Bone Train, Riddle, and Lion Tamer, respectively. She has had poetry published in Bombay Gin, Lalitamba, Tanka Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, and New Verse News, who nominated her poem And Then the Sky for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. Her new collection, Raising the Sparks, will be published by Breaking Rules Publishing in 2021.