Plume-hunting
A sonnet
Women were the cause, of course, it said in all the papers: Heartless birds of prey who hung the kill on thorns atop their heads to prove their wealth. They ordered men to lay down in the Everglades and wait until the snowy crown would show above the nest and then to shoot it with a painter’s skill, so that no spot of blood should stain the crest. The men, of course, would rather not have gone, or so they said when hats fell out of vogue— Each one of them had been an Audubon from birth, he claimed, and not a backwoods rogue who would have shot his neighbor for a plume. What the birds would say, we must assume.
Photo credit: Photo Dante - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42301356
Really excellent.
I wonder if the last line suffers from its missing syllable? My ear wants the first half of the last line to sound differently. I think it's the word 'say.'(?) It feels insufficiently weighty? The last half of the line is fantastic, but I might play around a bit some more with 'what the birds would say.'
The music of it reminds me a little of that Donald Justice sonnet about the Garden of Eden.