Eight wild wood ducks
greet me at the gate,
follow me down to the feed-room, wait
while I get them a handful of seed
before taking hay to the sheep
who descend upon it as if it were the last
lucerne in the country
I stand and watch
then leave them to it, walk off
to fill the water trough
the sky clearing
in more ways than meet the eye
the world outside these fences
so precariously at bay
it hardly bears thinking: all
things are full of meaning, so
they say, you just
have to wait for it;
what they don’t say
is how much you have to clear away
before the simplest things become evident
as this, for example,
dripping from the lip of the tank,
creeping like the sunlight
over the grass,
slipping from the beaks of wood ducks: how
we might share refuge, rescue
each other
David Brooks’ The Grass Library: Sheltering Animals in the Blue Mountains (‘a philosophical and poetic journey, both memoir and meditation upon animal rights’) is forthcoming from Brandl & Schlesinger.
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