Back from Wales

To headline news of health care,
guns, and Syria, the coastal
path slipped away, sea breeze
ceased, only traffic noise, but I remember—
Ahead of me behind me
dominion over roads runs the hard
brown path that scores cliffs,
heather, gorse, and thrift, that
joins villages and masters fog.
Walkers I pass have small
drugged smiles, sheep mill and
dine in ordinary splendor.
How perfect the Kestrel kiting, brown
triangle pinned to sky, backlit feathers
steady, spread, balanced with wind, only
the head shifts in his search of prey, then
unpinned he folds his wings and
dives from furthest part of the sky
toward my own time
unpinned and running out.

Marti Snell is in her last semester of the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and a Professor Emeritus of the University of Virginia. She resides in Charlottesville, Virginia. This is her first published poem.