WEBVTT

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In upstate New York
one time, Annie and I

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had fallen and fallen in
love with the hawks up there.

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They're very beautiful hawks,
red-tailed hawks they have,

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and we met a man there
named Dr. Heinz Meng, who

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is a student of hawks.

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And he's devoted
his life to birds,

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but he's especially
interested in hawks.

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And we hadn't realized how
extraordinarily beautiful

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they are.

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We use them as a
metaphor for some things

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that are kind of confusing,
but the creatures themselves--

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we've seen many of them flying.

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We never saw this,
but he had after he

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had made a film of hawks
exchanging prey in midair.

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Everybody has to live.

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He was, of course, a Darwinian,
and he loved the creatures.

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Sometimes I think that people
who sentimentalize animals

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secretly hate them.

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I hadn't realized that before.

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He loved the creature so much.

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This is a poem about
seeing two of the hawks.

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"You and I Saw Hawks
Exchanging the Prey"

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"They did the deed of darkness
in their own mid-light.

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He plucked a gray field
mouse suddenly, in the wind.

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The small dead fly alive
helplessly in his beak,

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his cold pride, helpless.

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All she receives is life.

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They are terrified.

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They touch.

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Life is too much.

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She flies away sorrowing.

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Sorrowing she goes alone.

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Then her small falcon, gone.

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Will not rise here again.

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Smaller than she, he
goes, claw beneath claw

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beneath needles
and leaning boughs,

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while she, the lovelier of
these brief, differing two,

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floats away sorrowing,
tall as my love for you,

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and almost lonelier.

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Delighted in the delighting,
I love you in mid-air,

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I love myself the ground.

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The great wings sing
nothing lightly.

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Lightly fall."

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