July 2015
/Vulture
by Mary Pinard
You can wear a body down to bone. Bold
beak, featherless head, even your feet are bald:
you are made for deep passages, final journeys.
Cathartidae: Purifier. No stranger to the lonely
roadside, no stranger to the field of battle—all
our endless wars—you do extra duty for the dead.
And yet you make the distant sky alive: your high
teetering glides and brush-like wing tips draw our eyes
open to new light, to heights far above this earthbound life.
Mary Pinard teaches in the Arts & Humanities Division at Babson College and lives in Roslindale, MA. Her collection of poems, Portal, was published by Salmon Press in 2014.