Vultures usually mark the end of a story: they arrive after everything else has stopped moving. Reuben's "Prelude: Vultures" opens by refusing that ending, and it closes by giving the birds a different job. The speakers, a collective "we", vow not to be picked over like carrion. They will "go down, flaming, with screaming tones". By the last line the vultures have been redirected at someone else, the "villain told in ancient rhymes".
The first stanza is phrased as a wish, not a statement: "Never may the vultures pick our bones." That "may" sounds like a prayer, or a curse turned inward. Even death is oddly framed as "the final crime", something done to the speakers rather than something that simply happens. The second stanza keeps the birds in the picture without naming them. When "time and rain may claw at our gravestones", the verb is a predator's. The weather has talons, so the scavenger is still hovering even when no bird is in sight.
The poem also pulls in two directions at once. The speakers "go down", yet they also climb: "Life and youth assist our endless climb / Ever upward, through no restful zones." Fire opposes the "cold" of the "eternal clime", and falling opposes rising. The poem never resolves the tension, which suggests that the defiance is the point. The speakers burn out loudly rather than fade quietly. The flat, almost bureaucratic word "zones" is a small surprise here. It makes the refusal of rest sound like a rule they have set for themselves.
The third stanza is one long sentence of postponement: "No bells of victory… No seating amid wealth on velvet thrones… Until…" Celebration and comfort are put off until the sky, "empty" at first, fills with the villain's groans. Then, after a dash that works like a held breath, the verdict arrives: "The vultures will leave nothing on his bones." This echoes the first line, with "our" swapped for "his". The wish of line one has become a prediction, and the threat has become an instrument of justice. The poem never says who the villain is, and being "told in ancient rhymes" makes him sound like a figure from old ballads or nursery verse. The phrase is also a little joke at the poem's own expense, since "rhymes" is exactly what this poem is made of.
The form is tightly controlled. The lines run to ten syllables and mostly follow iambic pentameter, with a few deliberate jolts. "Down, flaming" opens on a stress, so the line seems to drop. Line 11 is a syllable short, which makes it feel clipped before the dash. Most striking is the rhyme. Across thirteen lines, only two sounds appear: *-ones* (bones, tones, gravestones, zones, thrones, groans) and *-ime* (time, crime, clime, climb, chime, rhymes). The first eight lines follow the ABBA ABBA pattern of a Petrarchan sonnet's octave, and the last five (BAABA) read like a sestet one line short. Whether that shortfall is deliberate I can't say, but it fits a poem about things left unfinished. The repeated sounds give the poem a tolling, almost obsessive quality, like a refrain that won't let go. "Bones" is the very first and the very last rhyme word, so the poem ends where it began.
"Clime" and "climb" are the cleverest pairing, because they sound identical. One word names the cold place where the dead end up, the other the effort of the living, and the rhyme puts them side by side so that they seem like two faces of the same fact.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It takes a stock symbol of death and decay and reverses it, so that something that should terrify the speakers ends up working for them. Because the villain stays unnamed, readers can fill the role themselves, and the title "Prelude" hints that this is an opening statement, though the poem is complete enough to stand alone.