The deer are moving again, sojourners of snow,
shovel-faced bambis that shit brown M&M’s
in the yard without regard. The nerve
of these white-tailed vagabonds. The nerve
of these dashers and dancers that couldn’t pull a fat child
let alone a fat man. Don’t they know we are dying
and bats (maybe) laugh in their warm caves? Bats, yes,
where is Batman these days? This sick world deserves
an unreal hero. Alas, all I see when I peer out
my hermitage into black cold are scrawny bucks
nibbling juniper, hopped-up on hinds like the goat
from The Witch to doff babushka-like tarps.
Do they know about Lisa LaFlamme’s latest lament,
headlines – “Another surge in ICUs,”
“Cases soar dramatically” – that invade my mind?
No,
course not, to deer all that matters is survival.
Who knows how many are hunted, hit,
starved and diseased.
What I mean to say is that humans
have no monopoly on suffering
and deer eat, sleep, shit because they must.
Just last night, in wee hours wasted watching YouTube
(vortex of faces, loosely-linked
reactions to films I once saw in theatres
when it wasn’t open season on lungs),
scratching, pawing beneath the picture window,
enemies of no malice
eking out existence like children behind a dumpster.
Spooked by light and human garble they fled
silent, spindly-legged
down the street one by one in an unbroken line,
lost figures from an old canvas
moving nowhere but forward
to inherit the Earth.
USask's MFA in Writing Variety Show 