In the shadow of the volcano,
fresh from the dark sands of Siberia,
the brown steppe eagle circles and waits,
watching for weakness, searching
for carrion, leg feathers bristling,
shoulders hunched like a hunting wolf.
Exultant, it swoops down
on a yellow wagtail,
barks like a crow as it revels
in the taste of blood. I see
the bright buttery feathers
sticking to its wet tongue.
Feb 11, 2014
Feb 11, 2014 at 11:09 PM UTC
In the shadow of the volcano,
fresh from the dark sands of Siberia,
the brown steppe eagle circles and waits,
watching for weakness, searching
for carrion, leg feathers bristling,
shoulders hunched like a hunting wolf.
Exultant, it swoops down
on a yellow wagtail,
barks like a crow as it revels
in the taste of blood. I see
the bright buttery feathers
sticking to its wet tongue.
Not my poem, but I love her imagery and detail. The flight in her poem, the length of her lines and how pact they are with colors, shapes, and objects. How full her lines are!
Eveline Pye lectured in statistics at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland for more than twenty years. Before that, she worked as an operational research analyst in the Zambian copper industry. Her poems about Africa and mathematics have been widely published in literary magazines, newspapers, and anthologies in the U.K.
Her statistical poetry was featured in Significance, the joint magazine of the British Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association, in September 2011 as part of its Life in Statistics series. A selection of her statistical poems appears in the Bridges (Enschede) Anthology, edited by Sarah Glaz (Tessellations Publishing, 2013).
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