Hawk Roosting – Ted Hughes Poem

by
  1. I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
  2. Inaction, no falsifying dream
  3. Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
  4. Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
  5. The convenience of the high trees!
  6. The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray
  7. Are of advantage to me;
  8. And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.
  9. My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
  10. It took the whole of Creation
  11. To produce my foot, my each feather:
  12. Now I hold Creation in my foot
  13. Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly—
  14. I kill where I please because it is all mine.
  15. There is no sophistry in my body:
  16. My manners are tearing off heads—
  17. The allotment of death.
  18. For the one path of my flight is direct
  19. Through the bones of the living.
  20. No arguments assert my right:
  21. The sun is behind me.
  22. Nothing has changed since I began.
  23. My eye has permitted no change.
  24. I am going to keep things like this.