He looks up at a daydreamer’s sky.
It lures him with an insistent blue.
He practices his dawdle,
An impeccable lollygag.
Cloth sack with a bit of bread,
and all the time in the world.
He wings along with the searching hawk,
sees the wheat heads bow
to a sound
on the wind,
a droning he feels before he hears.
Drone grows into shadow –
huge blunt-nosed kite, grim and gray.
He runs to outpace it,
Stuttering racket pushes him, pushes him faster.
But he wants to just stand there
on the daily dirt road
to glimpse
the flyer,
to watch,
watch him keep it up there.
So, he looks back:
A little boy on a dirt road.
Deadly metal shards
spit out
one just close enough
to trace a thin line of red through his hair
and into
the dust.
