The Blue Falcon, cross the spire, Waits in the gables of the white House. Wounded in youth by crush Of air, spent, a wisp perched In the aerie dark with a view of mountains Blue as ice under glacier. The wooden Church from the other side clutches The sky but the Falcon blue is lost In a tuft of cloud that bobs but never Kills. On this strike he is sheathed in stealth The dull talons slip as they dry In the tented air, the songbirds at play In the high-ground underneath warble And chide but the Falcon cannot hear The Falcon near. His heart is soft And muted in the breast, his ears Are dumb to their tickling-songs.
Before the Falcons time, over The tilling fields, dropped his world In the spoils where splendour burst in green, Rain meant the feathers ran and the woods, A banquet of game, were bounty's breach Fording blue currents he was A fisher in the sun, but the sun Sank in his drowning sky no store From plateau to quarry the drought of days Moved a castle felled in the dancing Dust, his wings broke in the shuttered Eye of the sun and etched his form Into grey silhouette.
Now, the Blue Falcon, jeered In the branches of the rooted air Above the yellowed grass, under the pines And a great blue mountain, stirs a Druid Shape, vaporous, in the cauldron Of the attic in the white house A throw of stones crossways from The sacred yews of the steeple spire.