Old Moor Bird photo by Paul Brookes
Wolf,
where are you?
I know you’re there, lying low.
Not in these quiet meadows
and wooded slopes perhaps,
but along Garonne’s broad reaches
harried by flood waters,
where farm buildings sink beneath the weight of ivy,
wooden planking falls like flakes of slate.
Wolf, where are you?
Down there amid the forest-tangle,
the woodland left untended,
plantations abandoned?
Where sounders of boar roam uncontested?
Where deer multiply undisturbed?
The hunters know, and they won’t tell,
won’t give you away,
they want your souls for their private tally.
I would know, would love to find a sign,
not to pry, your paths are your own,
but to put your secret beneath protecting wings,
so, wolf, if you roam among these tangled trees
If you slip from shade to shade along the wild paths,
you may roam in silent peace, unhindered
by the envious, the destroyers of beauty.
Jane Dougherty
Bios and Links
Jane Dougherty
lives and works in southwest France. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems and stories have been published in magazines and journals including Ogham Stone, the Ekphrastic Review, Black Bough Poetry, ink sweat and tears, Gleam, Nightingale & Sparrow, Green Ink and Brilliant Flash Fiction. She blogs at https://janedougherty.wordpress.com/ Her poetry chapbooks, thicker than water and birds and other feathers were published in October and November 2020.