This is a work in progress concerning the decline in one of Britains most mysterious, beautiful and endangered mammals and one of our last truly wild animals.

 

Wild Cat

If I should leave now would you follow?

Leaving this hill to the plain winds and rain to weather down in torrents

The memory of me and a thousand other me’s?

If I should abandon this place to vermin and leave to those who serve me my home.

These places of sanctuary and respite from your haunts hold no replacement

For the barren blanket I provide for my reclusive comfort.

Where will you find the remoteness of warmth wearing widows’ weeds?

In the rock of the sky your conscience lays heavy as an ocean

On its impervious bed of certainty leaving the night ferocious, removed, remote.

The secluded pupil dilated as the moon of Revelation.

 

What is it you think you can do with me? You don’t own me

Like you think you own the pinewood. You cannot fell me.

I drink at your footprint, when your footprint is dry I will be gone.

 

There will be no ponderous mammoth in the ice

Only a barrenness to unburden the feral wasteland of fervid seclusion

That was yours is now mine as I go.

 

A new moon in the emptiness of heaven newly emptied,

Expressionless, muted and gagged in a forest where no shadow moves.

In rocks there will be no allusion to my form when I am gone.

 

All your nights will be bitten by the eremitic cold of the moon

Alone looking for the mountains soul never to find the once wide pupil

Or whisker trimming the lichen for I am not here.

 

When curled at the embers hearth of winter dusk I sleep.

Will you take my dreams and live them?

Take my dreams and return them to our keeper

Who will safe-guard them... now I am gone.