Deer In The Yard
A Poem About A City Deer (And Death)
I wouldn’t say our house is in the sticks
Or even in a suburb, I’d not say.
From house to house the space is not lain thick;
Just little lawns and narrow alleyways
And concrete rules the borders all throughout,
Garages, if we’ve got them, are attached,
And densely drew our architects our plots
Atop a hill atop a swampy flats.
And so when I looked out a summer day
Into our postage stamp of grass behind
The little home we have and saw what lay
Astride our flower bed, I searched my mind
A moment, wond’ring, could we get a deer
Into our yard by chance, a stowaway?
We’ve had our share of skunks and possums here,
And cats and cats and cats come every day.
Dreamlike it lay, relaxing on my mulch,
My wife confirmed the vision was the truth.
And kids, our kids, their little heads’d approach
To peek again and laugh and sing their youth.
She phoned up animal control. They said
They live all in the graveyard on the hill
And sometimes they come out to try and get
Some food when food is thin, or when they’re ill.
The swamp is going, malls and roads spring up,
A new one every day through the morass.
So up the hill the creatures all trip up
To share our graves, to prune our leaves of grass,
Our little postage stamp we scarcely use
Except to share among these disabused.
What they should do is move the graves into the swamp and build the malls on the hillside. But then I’m not in charge of malls or graves. Some day, I tell myself.
Thanks for reading these emails, folks. I think once I have a bunch of worthy poems out there maybe I’ll try to get them into a chapbook that people can buy on a “pay whatever amount you want basis” so you all can have a little something cluttering up your bookshelves, and won’t that be nice.
Go forth and tweet about my content, I beseech thee.
This is Phil
Photo by Vincent M.A. Janssen from Pexels