The poem is in unrhymed iambic tetrameter - a strange choice for such a fact-based poem but I wanted to see how it would work out.
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A deep-mist January morn
In half-dark gloom at 8.00am,
Frost speckling stones and pockmarked mud:
The road-verge grass was long and slumped,
Bright green and sprightly due to recent
Unseason rains, though dappled now
With heavy water drops condensed
From the night-ice air. A fox lay dead,
Stretched in the grass like a flung scarf;
Car-struck, its wounds were palpable.
Impossibly, its flattened tail
And both hind legs were splayed at angles
Like the three-legged emblem of the Isle
Of Man. And bursting from its backbone
Were blood-bright curlicues of flesh,
Gleaming and firm like butcher’s mince.
Again, atop its ribcage, clots
Of flesh extruded, streaked with mucus
And veined with black congealing blood.
A large bone, dull as ivory,
Its jagged end like hacksawed splinters,
Protruded from the breast, a clot
Of meat, like bloodied piled meringue,
Clinging about it. A swart eye
Had split, filling the socket with
A plug of lumpy off-white jelly
Which also clogged the tear-duct on
The rigid snout. Its jaw was open,
The teeth sunk in a browning froth
Of blood, although the lower canines
Rose clear and savage, dagger-curved
As wind-sculpt rock. An adult thing,
Three feet in length, its fur was stubby,
Much disarranged mid-body where
The darker fur, gone scabby, showed
The black-dust skin beneath. All else
Was chestnut-brown, except the belly
Where soft-cream hair was almost catlike.
The fox’s thin front legs lay crook’d,
Its blackly-mounded pads like quilts,
The sight of them suggestive that
It merely slept, and yet the purple
Starkness of arterial blood
Was proof enough that death had triumphed.
The blow some car had struck had burst
Its body, flinging it to land
Like fly-tipped waste among the grass.
Then what use was its pinpoint vision,
Able to home a field-mouse in
A hazel bush’s night-time depths
But stymied on a silent road
Past midnight by the sudden scream
Of car or truck, with headlights sousing
Its flexing sight and camouflaging
The bullet motion which in seconds
Exploded as a cuffing death,
Those yellow eyes, grape-wide, failing
To penetrate the raucous dazzle?
There’s sadness in that creature’s death,
Its fine fettle of fur and brush
Reduced to seething carrion;
Relief as well its constant goad
Of hunger, sting of parasites,
And iron-hearted breeding itch
Are stilled; its fellow fox or crow
Remorseless, though, will tear its body
To a motley lump of raw-flesh pickings
Unless the roadman with a shovel
Take it up with the other trash,
And sink it in his rubbish heap.
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©
January 2015