The larger world is darkness intensified, from Muslims beheading captives to Christians dismembering babies and selling their parts. I think about these things during the daylight hours, but in the stillness of the deepest dark, I often listen to the soft four footed tread of others who cannot sleep as they walk stealthily through the woods outside my kitchen window, and wonder what they would think if they could know what a superior lifeform was doing to itself.

My kitchen window is the door
Into another world
A world of birdsong and what’s more
A world quite deeply squirreled
Sometimes at night in deepest dark
When lit by silver moon
I hear my neighbor’s hound dog bark
He likes not that raccoon
And yet I’m sure I’ve never heard
Of raccoons being burned
Alive by furry beast or bird
That’s something they’ve not learned
Some distance off a tom meows
He wanders, like my verse
A sound that sets off hound dog growls
But silence can be worse
My friends outside give not a thought
To who is knight or knave
They know that life cannot be brought
Back from the silent grave
My world is quiet late at night
The kitchen dark and still
The birds sit waiting for the light
To sit upon my sill
This morning though a raven black
Laughed through his cackling call
And stared me down as I stared back
And said, Let’s kill them all
The Muslims and beyond the pale
The women with black hearts
Arranging for the final sale
Of murdered baby parts