Rapt #5: Sanctuary

For most of us, a speck in the sky
is whatever the experts say it is.

We struggle to see through their eyes, partitioning
the landscape. Look two glasses above the slope

of Pinnacle, they say. Now high over Owl’s Head.
We are here for hawk migration, and the hawks

are here, too, evidently, but so high
above they barely register: kettles

of broad-wings circle, climbing thermals in groups
of twenty, forty, sixty, sometimes thousands.

I struggle to care about something so distant,
out of sight. Distracted, I am thinking instead

about the people, mostly white, who labored
up the short climb to this summit, their unsteady

steps, fatigue, breathlessness, marking
what they treasure here: the old remembering

past summits, the young storing up
stories of wilderness. Turkey vultures circle close,

tipping side to side, their wings in that classic V.
Hunters on this Kittatiny ridge once shotgunned

thousands of migrating hawks a year until, appalled
by photos of the raptors’ corpses arranged

in tidy rows, a New York socialite bought
the mountain to block the massacre.

Sanctuary built on slaughter: what would
it take to make space for migrants

abandoned in the deserts, perishing
on open seas, water-cannoned, bloodied, caged?

An older man with good binoculars calls out:
Bald eagle on the left, beside the cell tower,

below the windmill ridge, the shuttered coal plant.
At the same time, an expert points high overhead:

we strain to see past our works and desolations
to the opening hidden in that dark cloud, that patch of blue.