Two Poems

Urban Fox

Bullet
of russet muscularity
knee high
and up to your eyes
in dandelion

most feline
of your kind,
the always searching canid,
sinewy and taut,
prodigal child
of the copse:

no sooner had you
brushed against a fence
emerging from sedge
as if to prove, “I still exist,”
than the glimpse of you was gone—

a second’s shred
in which to see
that tail, ash-
white copper-coalesced
trailing like a newly lit
cigar.

Weasel

I found you in mid hunt,
in search of eggs,
invertebrates,
or unsuspecting voles.

All in a moment
I saw you slide
a tangled thicket,
arch-backed,
like an elongated
pint of lager,
gingery flanks
licked by a frothy rim
of white,
a lithe half-yard
of fur:

probing reed beds,
eyes primed
you sensed me,
uncoiled, flash-like,
snuck beneath a clump
of sedge and nettle
and vanished into undergrowth.

Simon Zonenblick is a writer and an aspiring horticulturist from Yorkshire, England.

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