Lament for the Feet

Except a six-year pony penned from birth

inside a barn, I never seen anything worse.

Eleven dobermans and mixed breeds, some still pups,

removed from a residence after anonymous tips

about a dead dog decomposing on the porch.

Still and yet, this many dogs almost beats that one horse.

The problem of human freedom one might couch

in other terms than Kant’s. It’s nasty in there.

Dog shit everywhere. I don’t see how she could breathe.

The woman, nearly ninety, wept and pleaded

with the workers. I’ve been raising dogs right here

in this very house since before your mothers were born.

If I’m treating these dogs as bad as you say,

how come you need those chokers to drag them away?

The Humane Society truck’s radio, left on,

played “Me and Bobby McGee.” They were strays, unwanted.

I fed them and gave them a home. Now you’ll kill them

and call me cruel. And who will protect me?

How will I sleep? When asked, the welfare worker

said the woman cannot be forced from her home.

But freedom of will is not freedom from necessity

and obligation. The neighbors lost interest soon

and left her lawn. Meanwhile a breeze blows in

from the Gulf on a girl showing her friends the spot where

she lost her left foot to a shark. He kept twisting it

like a dog with a rag, she says just to hear them squeal.

Really, he only managed to take a chunk and maul

the rest, but the doctors had to amputate.

She had to learn to trust loss. And in Houston

a boy tries to jimmy a padlock with a broom

to free his six-year-old sister from the storage shed

their parents told them was “the naughty room.”

She was causing trouble at school, wetting her bed,

and threatening to run away. We made a decision.

We thought a few hours here was best for her.

Police said the girl had been left water.

A person may purchase the wind and the sun

at the price of perpetual peregrination.

Source: Surely as Birds Fly (Truman State University Press)