Feral Child

Feral Child looked for wolves and found a fox

on the golf course - they both hiding, both seen,

she in her orange coat and she in Khaki green.

Both camped out in bushes of thorns, as bold

as ghosts who can't be caught, snapping the traps

layed by the hunters employed just the night before.

Feral Child, a scruffy dove with one wing on her

right shoulder and a swag bag of treasures on her left,

looked the swaggering golfer straight in the eye.

A whittled craft box in her hand, she would emerge,

cocking her head: Can't even carry your own bag Sir,

to escape your Sunday home? I'll sell you these... and 

lifting the lid on all the bounty she had found:

...each for a quid, or these: two for a pound!

Her camps were legendary, never owned so never lost,

and so it was with irony that she saw them hunted down

in others' dreams...she couldn't save the blind moles.

But the other creatures dying in the bush found her 

or the fox's grin - whichever first would quench her thirst,

as it should be, quick; an edible heart, a twist or rip of the neck.

Dead. She would watch the kill, collect the poison pellets left

that scattered her tracks with future cries...So civilised, 

the hunter, the guest golfer - and they called her Feral Child.

2005