By John Grey
PROMPT — If only ...
Fox took a prize chicken.
Coyote got the cat.
Ron's dad went out into the woods
with a rifle on the morn
but didn't shoot a thing.
Not even the raccoon
that stripped a turtle from its shell.
Ron burst into tears three times.
He raised that bird himself.
The cat came from Rescue.
Okay so the turtle
was no dear companion
but to see the empty shell
just lying there...
Ron would have cried his heart out
had it been one of those painted turtles
that sunned beside the lake.
"That's nature," his father would say,
as he put the unfired rifle back in its case.
“Fox, coyote, raccoon, they all gotta eat.'
Ron tried to imagine a world
without predators.
There was no such world.
Just an age.
And he’s older than that now.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, and has been recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Lost Pilots. His latest books are Between Two Fires, Covert and Memory Outside The Head. His writing is forthcoming in California Quarterly, Birmingham Arts Journal, La Presa, and Doubly Mad. John writes from Providence, RI.
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