On the way home from
some unimportant errand
I swerved on the dark road,
inches from a huge ditch,
and a catapult into eternity
and just missed hitting
three baby bunnies hip hopping
back and forth across the road
to their wounded mother
lying half squashed on the yellow line
its back legs still kicking,
its body a credit card
its head still intact and wide eyed,
seconds from death it writhed,
I stopped the car,
no one else around me,
and wondered at what I should do,
finish the job death
had so cruelly started,
or simply drive on,
the vet hospitals
simply put wild animals to sleep,
they did not treat them,
her babies had disappeared into the bushes,
that lined the ditch along the road,
the dilemma was quite troubling
but then the mother bunny went still,
its big brown eyes
glazing in the moonlight,
and so I drove on,
thankful that I had not hit it,
but saddened by its passing,
on my watch in this life.
The next morn I happened to be driving
in that same vicinity,
and all that remianed was blood and gore,
mixed with soft fur on the asphalt,
no matter whose fault it was,
but sadly just inches away
lay the crushed body
of one of the baby bunnies,
who had returned to it's momma
in some moment of instinct, remorse,
or just trembling fear,
and was also slaughtered,
under the tires of some passing vehicle,
bearing the last chapters
of two misguided creatures
final journeys.
