Poem of the Day: ‘Hawks in Holy Week’

For Wednesday in Holy Week, The New York Sun continues its selection of poems read by living poets. Here the Sun’s associate poetry editor, Sally Thomas, reads “Hawks in Holy Week,” a portion of a longer work. Author of the poetry collection “Motherland” and co-editor of the forthcoming “Christian Poetry in America Since 1940,” Ms. Thomas uses a Welsh form known as gwawdodyn hir: a sestet of varying syllabic lines, rhymed aaaaba, with the b rhyme repeated in a syllable in the last line of the stanza — all to speak of Tenebrae, the dying away of the light, and a hawk’s eye cast on the world.