Notes About The Poem
February 19, 2025
~ First Place ~
Premiere Contest: Poetry Marathon Mile 24
Sponsor: Mark Toney
~ Ninth Place ~
Premeire Contest: Healing
Sponsor: Kai Michael Neumann
Orphan
I chance upon her
in the far reaches of the backyard,
a place I never go. There she trembles.
A tiny tiger, whose newborn eyes blur the world,
secreted in mother-scented-shadows
below blackthorn shrubs.
Faint mews draw me closer.
The power of her vulnerability
fills my veins with a ripple rising,
brimming me with a nectar needed,
like a dry stream bed restored by remedy rains.
How helpless she is with new eyes open.
Her eyes like skylights — clear
and filled with new-wild-blue innocence.
Neglected yet beautiful, I sense in her
the familiar phenomenon of the impulse to pulse.
Her outsized feistiness belying
such a petite package of plea and need
with teeny needle claws and barely a wisp of a hiss
...and I recall when I felt the fear
of being small and voiceless in a choiceless world.
Born a feral kitten, her mother likely lost
to speed-wheels of a car or snap-jaws of coyotes,
whose throats float steaming howls above black
saw-toothed pines to haunt the long night moon
...and I wonder, if she wonders,
if the sweet-milk-purrs with soft belly fur
will ever return to snuggle her.
She’s been cold and alone for far too long.
So I gather her in the hug of my hands
warming her as I draw her in and curl
my chest around her littleness.
A shield formed against her lone-ness.
...and I, a long-ago-child abandoned,
a child whose silent cries heard only by stoic walls,
reclaims a voice that helps me make a choice
not to let Nature decide how birth and fate collide.
So I sit with her, swaddle her, love her.
Nourish her with eye-dropper milk where
hearth embers still glow after the fire,
to heal the orphan and raise the phoenix within.
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