[Ambitious Kate]

I had looked for this which I wrote some years ago to post last spring and its a bit late now that I found it on an old hard drive. Just thought it was "farmly" enough to post here. Cheers.

Spring Mouse

Spring, which comes at last to us all
has its starts and stops
the early lilies cropped by deer
the new grasses flooded away in rivulets
the sparrows’ mangling of blue-bird chicks.

And on the cool barn floor
four mouselets newly un-blind
have gathered round their mother
(stiff these some-odd days, surely) and
too far-gone for saving
paddle the air and bleat
a poor way to go
after a fine mouse start.

Poison might have done her in.
I bristle, ticking off fool neighbors
who might have set it out risking
pets and grandchildren and
curious small things, but no,
the mouslets had fared well enough for a while
(but for want of a mousely nurse)
and no convulsions belie their dam’s repose.

She turns over on my shovel showing an angry red teat
her back leg pulled up against her belly.
A cow or a mare would have had a salve and a pill
but Mouses live or die by nature’s whim and chance
on a lovely spring morning
her kits in tow
who will never see
the best of spring’s starts
the one now hurrying
on into summer.

@2004 Cheryl Higgins

[Kachina]

Nicely done. Made me sad and mindful of all of the intrinsic tragedies in nature that farm life smacks you with sometimes.