Zbornik Mednarodnega literarnega srečanja Vilenica 2004 - Ljudmila

Sydney Lea
I imagined using, precisely, a maul on this poor, disheveled, sickly beast,
because I didn’t want my small daughters to hear me fire the shotgun
blast
that would do him in. Yet I admit I was also afraid to get too close,
and I likewise must have supposed a bludgeoning would make an awful
mess,
and somehow it might have felt too much as though I’d brought a heavy
blade
down on baffled Arthur, the coon’s human image, as I’ve already said.
The shotgun having been fired, the creature fell and huffed once. Then:
silence.
And I, no more than a dreary man of letters, as if my knee had jerked,
thought of myself at one end and Arthur at the other of a cropped white
birch,
and of a famous poet’s phrase about things being »yoked together by violence.«
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