Lullabye to a Fawn

We found you curled beneath the windowpane
in the corner, between the brick and bush.
Warm and not yet stiff, limp with dream and wet
density of an August afternoon.
Mute and motherless, your body was
a self-embracing spiral, a withdrawal
from the clawed savageness of the living.

Into the bag, I gathered your speckled
fur, infant’s rounded muzzle, lanky limbs.
Although I felt strong, brave of heart, I wept
as I carried you down the slick ravine
and shoveled late into the humid dusk.

By the end, when I stank of rot and sweat
the moon had revealed herself to the sky
resonating a strange, silver halo.
She purified us with silk and silence:
our mother of stone, our angel of ice.

Now in winter’s stark stillness, she murmurs
to you in your cradle of soil and leaf.
Each gulped night, as you are swallowed deeper
into earth, she caresses you with her
frosted beams – comforts us, mother and child,
laden with memories of each other.