Nature

Nature

The hardest thing about watching

the lioness take down the fawn

is the resolve the doe has to submit

to in the tall grass, how she

has to watch it all from the out-

of-reach she’s run to, and listening back:

the exhausted soft bleat and the jaw

closing over the throat

in a warm gurgle.  It’s

suffered, it is, it’s the mean

way of the world I’m told early

on and aren’t we glad

we’re not running for our

lives the way the gazelle needs

to or the zebra, or on occasion

the small giraffe against

the practiced lioness or hyena.  Later I'd think:

it’s wrong to pin something human

on them but what else can it be

called when, sated, the big cats

lick the blood from their paws

and purr and growl and take up

letting themselves be mounted

from behind in the lazy

uncommitted way of some nights?

The way they allow the lion

to come into them and send

the future up to almost caress

  

the fawn that’s been making

it’s way down and through them and then

what’s left will be taken out

into the grass where his mother

for the sake of nature

left him to his fate?  She can’t

take many chances being young

herself and fit to run

and taking her escape

to the next hundred acres

and making a new baby

when the time comes.  And maybe

that baby will make it

unabandoned, (but hey,

because they’re not human

they can’t be

blamed) and maybe it’s the season

the lions go

hungry for a while

and can’t run for the distance

it takes to stalk and wait

and cull and hunker and spring

up out of the golden grass

having made their claim.

The pursuit is never informal

even though the way they are

framed and filmed

makes them seem like

a street fighter who comes up

to his long rival and blam!

and it’s all done but the drag

of it, away from

the lights and the spilling

away of night off into morning

that tells all that can be told

as criminal and then

  

somewhere off in the future

there maybe can be some

forgiveness for it all.  But the

gazelle and the lioness?  They

have an agreement

we don’t need to interfere with

or even think to intervene.  They take up

the same plain in their hide

and make dust with it

and babies and come the rain

the moon the two or three

trees they each may retreat

to, beneath or in.  Because something's lost
something and something hasn’t, and who

are we to choose which is best

for us to see? It’s not our meat and it won’t be.