Vixen

She’d been hit, and laid on the verge.

Slinging her dead weight
round the shoulders
for a two mile walk to the cottage
that drew stares, her head walloping
this and that way,
my hands held her paws at peace.

Under the hedge all summer
she suffered the usual.
Her snarl deterred nothing.
Beetles decided not
to bury; so she became
a maggoty mess
of fur and ammonia.

Skull severed for the boys
and dunked in a bucket of bleach,
what was left of her muscle and skin
burned to the bone.

And there she finally was.
Poised on a stone in the sun,
her useless canines.

Somewhere else,
cubs whined their last
for meat that never arrived.

© Jim Stewart