Fox with a feather
wait until dark.
Fox-brother with your clever face
calm the careless bird without a mark.
September is your gotten grace
fallen from a limb.
Remember when the keeper comes
to hide where he's just been.
Lonely is the blue light of the moon reflected so
upon the calm and silent bird roosting on the snow
without a song, with unlit eyes, its feathers pulled and dull
with sobriquet of red it gets from names your teeth bestow.
Fox with a feather
wait until dawn.
The keeper loads his gun to bless
the live ones on the lawn.
_______
for Sunday Muse #125.
It is a dangerous world at dawn or dusk for the fox and the bird of prey. I love the beautiful plea that gives poetic wisdom in these lines. The repetion of caution from day and night is a wonderful touch that drives this home. The circle of life, danger, and loss: bird fox and man. Superb as always my friend!
ReplyDeleteOh, where your imagination took this one. This is killer Shay!
ReplyDeleteOf course yours truly, little goody two-shoes, had to make them friends! This is a beautiful poem, Shay, as your poems always are, and it evinces the stark reality of it all.
ReplyDeleteA sad fact, to our way of thinking – or just part of nature – that foxes and cats are lethal hunters. Yet I love them both! And I love this spare, elegant poem with its interesting rhyme scheme and the variant long-line verse reminding us of the sad facts of foxness.
ReplyDeleteThis gives me a Bambi chill.
ReplyDeleteA lovely sinister little piece, full of a sort of reflective quality that reveals only darkness, like the way an animal's eyes glow red in the light at night-time. Nature is dangerously easy to anthropomorphize into a cute and fuzzy world, when of course, it simply runs like a machine, and the winners and losers pick themselves. The rhyme here is exquisite, and adds to the spell-like, suspended quality of the images. Fine writing, Shay, unsparing and true.
ReplyDeleteShay--As always, when you make use of rhyme, it sneaks up on me. I never see it coming (or that it's come) until midway into it. That's the mark of a fine, fine poet. You never compromise the meaning, the heart, the rhythm of a piece to simply make the lines rhyme.
ReplyDeleteI especially love the near-echo of the first and last stanza. And anything about foxes--I eat up.
Lovely ballad for the fox. I find myself shivering with each stanza.
ReplyDeleteI wondered about that feather and thought what was left behind? I didn't want to dwell on the dark side long as my nature would be to turn blue like your moon. One has to wonder about the trickery of the fox and would a hunter than seek the fox or perhaps the turkey who lost a feather.
ReplyDeleteThis is POETRY! Lyrical, expansive, gorgeous and such impact, especially at the closing lines. You made me wish I had written a poem about a happier fox than the one I wrote about. Sigh. 2020 has been my year of Doom and Gloom. Remember when I once was so cherful?
ReplyDeleteLove this, the flow of the rhyme is stellar. Dawn or dusk can certainly be treacherous for wild creatures. I feel it is part warning, part celebration of the incredible ability of the wild to maneuver through the unknown.
ReplyDeleteI have been reading your poetry for over a decade .. and still you surprise me, delight me, inspire me.
ReplyDelete"The keeper loads his gun to bless
ReplyDeletethe live ones on the lawn." -- Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! So good!
So may dangers to animals and humans out there. Circle of life.
ReplyDeleteThis is written beautifully, seamlessly.