Poetry

You soft pair! tears indeed lol I have tears too from laughing LOL

Good poems though Ruth & Harry

Hi all, have been reading your poetry and enjoying, so much to do on this site.

Thought you may like a poem from Greywolf.

Your astute poem, Wolf,  brings to mind one I wrote some months ago.  Here it is:

Hunter and Hunted



Far into the jungle the hunter walks
With loaded weapon he quietly stalks
Through dense thickets and vegetation
Overhead a gibbon gawps in agitation

Parakeets squawk a signal to others
Teeming wildlife – young and mothers
Heeding the cries of their companions
Take flight in treetops and bottomless canyons

Through the clearing, blaze of black and gold
Eyes of slits, perceptive, yet old
As the hunter, through crossed hairs
Espies his quarry as it glares

Man and beast seem not to survive
Side by side, both to stay alive
Wise tiger chooses to vacate
Only time would decide his fate

Hunted tiger leaves on the jungle floor
His trail that imparts his unique spoor
He knows that he’s no match
For the hunter’s rifle-latch

Too late, he hears the click of the cast-steel bolt
Painfully, he comes to a sudden halt
As the speeding projectile pierces his side
And delighted rifleman displays his pride

Dying tiger ignores his man-made pain
Never, will he enjoy fatherhood again
He displays his hatred with his last roar
But forever his regal image will soar

Panthera tigris will continue to survive
Despite man’s iniquity they will thrive
As the hunter’s skin withers beneath the earth
The tiger’s pelt will increase in worth

Hi Lorraine,

Forgive me for not answering sooner regarding your query about the Sheltie. Yes I have owned several of them little critturs, but the one in the avetar was a very fine original watercolour by a fairly famous illustrator called Andrew P. Grundon Signed in 1986. It cost me £4.00 in a boot sale. It is a lovely illustration.

Ray. 

Hi Wolf:  Yes, I too would love to see more.  Your poem and Harry's remind me of a quote from A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold.

"We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.

In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy; how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable side-rocks.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view."

Leopold writes about this as his epiphany regarding the senselessness of trying to eliminate wolves from the ecosystem they play such a huge role in.