Snow Leopard I
SNOW LEOPARD I
Two months ago
at the municipal zoo, Zena
the snow leopard gave birth
to Asa, a spotted ball of fur
with big floppy paws
Eventually he will grow to
two hundred pounds of muscle
and teeth, cunning and claws and
a forty-foot leap – beautiful,
terrible, perhaps released to
the wild!
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if
duplicitous diplomats, nefarious
negotiators, disingenuous generals,
oil-slicked oligarchs, and knee-jerk
jihadis had the simple integrity of
the perpetual predator, or better than
that, could be released one at a
time in the snow leopard habitats of
east-central Asia, and that, stripped
of their immunity, their bodyguards
and weapons, their bunkers and tunnels
and propaganda apparatus, and their
private assassins who make everyone
afraid of the last head of lettuce in the
marketplace stall, of the lingering
individual near the elementary school,
of the wind in the trees or the patter
of rain that disguises their footsteps
on the stairway at night……..?
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if these
much-feared moguls of mayhem and
murder would have to navigate the
terrain of the sleek, silent hunter
and discover, if only in the moment
of sensing a shadow in their peripheral
vision or a feathery whisper in one
ear or the other, that the natural kill
would be clean, quick and guileless,
impersonal and just?
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