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IF ONLY THERE WERE NO PREDATORS

By John Grey

PROMPT — If only ...

Fox took a prize chicken.

Coyote got the cat.

Ron's dad went out into the woods

with a rifle on the morn

but didn't shoot a thing.

Not even the raccoon

that stripped a turtle from its shell.


Ron burst into tears three times.

He raised that bird himself.

The cat came from Rescue.

Okay so the turtle

was no dear companion

but to see the empty shell

just lying there...

Ron would have cried his heart out

had it been one of those painted turtles

that sunned beside the lake.


"That's nature," his father would say,

as he put the unfired rifle back in its case.

“Fox, coyote, raccoon, they all gotta eat.'


Ron tried to imagine a world

without predators.

There was no such world.

Just an age.

And he’s older than that now.


 

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, and has been recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Lost Pilots. His latest books are Between Two Fires, Covert and Memory Outside The Head. His writing is forthcoming in California Quarterly, Birmingham Arts Journal, La Presa, and Doubly Mad. John writes from Providence, RI.

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