The Ballad of Balancing Acts.

A Poem by Marshall

Buried in the birchwood camps where wood rot
and leaves trace many summers of being
Lies the old skeletal remains of a frisky deer
Silently sleeping eyes, glazed and stricken tongue
hanging out of of lucid mouth
pellet covered with heart muscle and frozen sinews

Hunter ravaging the forest for fresh meat
struck at the dawn of reason and aiming
pulled a perfect shot at grazing deer but struck
the one that wasn't looking directly. The others
sped into the thicket down the hill away.

Life and death intermingled in the gloom
of wanting and not wanting. The hunter walked away
rather than cross the valley for quarry
and burden his strained back for his prize.

Further down in the sparse sandy gorse and shrub
other smaller prizes waiting undisturbed by the
crack of death higher up. Life benign

Again he lowered rifle to his squinting eye
and squeezed the trigger. The sound echoed
across the valley, through the birchwood trees
and quiet calmed the pulsing racing hearts.

The hunter picked his carcass from the gorse and soil
and headed home. Guilty of of greed, two deaths for one small
meal of roasted meat to share his whisky thirst.
The night descended with its blanket of black
and other predators shredded their prize uphill
thankful for lazy hunters.

Life and death balanced itself in the wilderness
nature spoke with an even tone.