Snow Lepard Ii

SNOW LEOPARD II My name is Asa! I am a conjured spirit and an evolving reality in the frigid taiga landscape between Angaraland to the north and the Kazakh Steppes to the south! The indigenous people say I am silent, beautiful and dangerous, and I agree! I like these people! The bad men came with their over-size cameras, their guides and their guns, brought their attitudes and habits from far-away places where they murder their neighbors for profit and power. I recognized them all from an earlier poem The first one died while he made morning coffee and fiddled with his combat knife. For a fraction of a second he thought the wind had changed direction bringing new sounds and smells, then a slow-motion shower of blood and caffeine and cooking fire sparks, his friends unaware in the warmth of their tents I took the second one at the evening campfire where they talked tough to each other about my pelt as a trophy on somebody’s wall! For just a few seconds a cloud hid the moon and my forty foot leap before the explosion of snow, the fountain of blood, the screams and the curses, the errant gun shots! There was no viral video! The ballet of my violence is not for display! There would be no drunken stories, no photo-shopped legends, no lies about courage at dinners back home in Phnom Penh, Palermo, Tegucigalpa or Sinaloa, Chicago or Riyadh! With a military escort, the bad men left the very next day. I watched them from a distance. My people now safe: I hunted. I ate. And I slept! Asa: From ancient Hebrew meaning “doctor”, “healer”! Conjure: To summon into being the ancestral spirits!