Monday's Poetry: "The Fawn"

by Pa Rock
Poetry Appreciator

Basically I live in the "country."  I have a small home on ten acres - at an intersection of two paved roads - about two miles from the center of a town of twelve thousand.  Deer and other wildlife are plentiful where I live, but throughout the recent spring the deer were strangely absent.  That led me to speculate that last fall's hunters may have been a might too successful.

I have a salt lick up by the little pond, and the block of white salt attracts occasional deer, but it is usually commandeered by the farm's many squirrels.  Most afternoons I have a large apple for a snack, and I always carry the apple core up to the salt lick where I deposit it on the ground with the hope that a passing deer will enjoy it - but I suspect that the squirrels get them as well.

Occasionally the farm acts as a resort for visiting possums, skunks, ground hogs, and even armadillos, and my son swears that he has seen a very large panther-like black cat on more than one dark night.

Thee deer have returned from their hiatus within the past few weeks.  I have a large pear tree deep in the backyard that is loaded with fruit every summer, and the deer always get most of it.  This year several showed up for the pear harvest.  First they ate the ones that had fallen to the ground, then they spent a couple of days butting the tree to shake others loose, and finally the stood beneath the old tree, on their back feet, and stretched their necks as far into the tree as they could to get the really stubborn pears that had refused to fall.

Now the pear tree is empty, but some of the deer have stayed on.  Yesterday I watched two small spotted fawns as they walked beneath my bathroom window and out toward the road.  Just as they got to the road, one of my hillbilly neighbors roared by and scared them back into the yard.  Soon I saw them with their mother, lazily eating a patch of weeds surrounding one of the trees.

The more weeds the deer eat at my place, the more welcome they are!

One of my neighbors (who probably learned science from his grandmother - or Elly May Clampett's grandmother) told me that the deer are responsible for all of the ticks that are plaguing the Ozarks this summer.  Others blame the mild winters brought about by climate change, but the locals who are weened on Fox News know that climate change is fake news.   That leaves ticks as one more good reason to slaughter deer.

Here is Edna St. Vincent Millay's experience of unexpectedly coming upon a fawn lying on the ground:


The Fawn
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

There it was I saw what I shall never forget
And never retrieve.
Monstrous and beautiful to human eyes, hard to believe,
He lay, yet there he lay,
Asleep on the moss, his head on his polished cleft
small ebony homes,
The child of the doe, the dappled child of the deer.

Surely his mother had never said, "lie here
Till I return," so spotty and plain to see
On the green moss lay he.
His eyes had opened;  he considered me.

I would have given more than I care to say
To thrifty ears, might I have had him for my friend
One moment only of that forest day:

Might I have had the acceptance, not the love
Of those clear eyes;
Might I have been for him in the bough above
Or the root beneath his forest bed,
A part of the forest, seen without surprise.

Was it alarm, or was it the wind of my fear lest he depart
That jerked him to his joints knees,
And sent him crashing off, leaping and stumbling
On his new legs, between the stems of the white trees?