Sonnet

Deer. Prudence.

My heart went out to her. And didn’t come back.

Photo by Isaac Burke on Unsplash

I came upon her wounded in the dawn, on her left hind leg a mass of blackened fur and buckshot. Her caution all but gone, she limped to the dog treats in my cupped hand and looped her leather tongue around them all. Her eye was huge, an orb of pain and hope in the gathering light and I recall wishing for some way, just a length of rope, to leash and miraculously heal her. But she the wiser, stamped back and stalked off to where the coyote next day would steal her, and seven vultures, black, would come to quaff their fill, and roost their filthy heads and wings. And I, in my heart, ponder all these things.