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THE HAWK

W. HAUDEN

Saturday, December 1st, 2001

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 The goal is not what it seems to be.
Imagine a hawk, soaring high above the stadium,
Circling the match day ground in preoccupied concentration –
What does he see through storm rent clouds?
A Lowry line of matchsticks marching to the ground?
Cigarette ends smouldering in the directors’ box?
Prawn sandwiches mouldering in the catering shops?
A white line order where no order exists?
Seventy thousand eyes fixed ground wards?
Cantilevers striving ever upwards?
Old men staring from net curtained windows?
Car filled streets and yet no passengers?
A white dot moving towards an outstretched hand?
Twenty-five figures and yet just five colours?
A manic rush of monitors and cameras?
All the discarded rubbish left from a game,
Programmes, ticket stubs, raffle tickets, golden goal tickets,
Pocket picked wallets, spittle, fanzines,
The scarves and scars of supporters fighting?
He sees none of these – his goal lies elsewhere,
For there, on a fag-filled weed-strewn terrace,
Two miles from the current spectacle,
Lay the last infected entrails of the last calf born,
The last calf born before Nature’s final Nemesis.
Encased in stargazy pastry-potato,
The last pie left till Judgement Day,
Grew ever larger in the high hawk’s eye,
Until he swooped and soared up into the blood red clouds,
And then straight down to alight upon a floodlight,
A brown stained beak dripping silhouetted showers of offal
Onto the flat capless heads of the crowd below.
And there flies the answer to the old eternal question,
A question as old as any adamantine hill or henge –
Who ate all the pies? The Hawk did.

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/the-hawk/