Where the pines were lopped off the summit of a hill and the hilltop flattened by bulldozers, where culverts were laid,

where sleek new roads wind through scrubby grass to nowhere,

past the prayers that would have been answered by three minutely different versions of the same house in row after row,

beyond the unsold lots and the developer’s insolvency hearing,

past the realtor’s tin shingle,

a slope where children with cardboard boxes are pressing the year’s first snow into a sheet of ice, filling the crisp January air with jubilance:

if redemption had a voice, it might sound like this.

           
                                    A snowy branch

                                    Blood
                                    on the hawk’s talons