Author: SuzAnne C. Cole
Location: Texas

A community college English instructor for most of her career, SuzAnne C. Cole now concentrates on writing. Her poems have been published in many anthologies and magazines and they've won a Writer's Digest Personal Poetry contest and a haiku festival in Japan. She was a juried poet at the 2003 and 2005 Houston Poetry Fests and a featured poet at the 2004 event.

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Eating War

Blood stains my hornlike beak,
soils my hard and glossy breast.
I have been eating war.

Far below survivors stumble on,
dragging their salvaged goods,
eyes down, disbelieving.

Homes, young men gone,
daylight going.
I swoop down to dine on carrion.

My beak savages
the unresisting flesh, greedily
devouring a nation in gobbets.

When I lift my yellow-eyed head,
spread my wings to soar,
my meal of war weighs me down.

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Published in Sol Poet Laureate issue 4/04, and Farsight Magazine issue 8/05.

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