Letters to Guns

Apocrypha

40 Apocrypha Poem to be read in private Because the pines had deep voices and the rocks none at all, the wild dogs of the national park learned to whistle. You could hear them, or rather had you been a fox or rabbit or some other steaming thing born to be ripped apart you could have heard them, whistling each other up from miles away. They sounded like screams and they sounded like trains and they sounded like bombs falling from aeroplanes. sometimes their songs were long and continuous as if to accompany the story of hunting you. But mostly they were quick; a few notes to say You are close and I am close and together we are one mouth swallowing God. each year some person or other, a hunter or gatherer, would become lost in the park and not be found. They would confuse a rock or tree for one they knew and lose their way. As night came, they too would hear the whistling, so like the whistling of men, and mistake it for someone come to find them. They would follow or answer with a whistle of their own and well, you can imagine. Later, when the dogs had finished them 41 and the bones or guns of the lost people lay drying, the pines might say something low and a rock or two might whisper, but nothing memorable. nothing that stayed in the ear. ...