This was partly inspired by my Auntie May who used to go out into the woods beside her farmhouse in Aberdeenshire to saw the rungs in half on the ladders the deer hunters built to get them up to their hides. I was also thinking of images of watchtowers and of the prototype walls erected in the Californian desert by contractors vying for contracts to build Trump’s Mexican wall.
Dank autumn nights
she silently stood
a hawk with a handsaw
deep in the woods
She saw Jacob’s Ladders
to the kingdom to come
angel of mercy
ascending the rungs
Thirteen steps up
is the measure of man
fire in her eyes
blade in her hand
She cut through the bars
leaving just enough give
at the hint of a foothold
to snap like a twig
The hunters on high
their AK 45s
their night vision goggles
crosshair laser sights
Not for the beauty
not for the meat
roe deer exploding
too scattered to eat
Helicopter gunships indiscriminately strafe their way across parched plain. Gazelle giraffe zebra springbok bounce and spin somersault and cartwheel ahead of the rain.
In Colorado the hunter stalks the mountain lion following the clover leaf prints in the snow until he comes full circle and finds his own tracks the paw prints now following rather than preceding his.
The huntress now becomes the hunted, stalked to her bower, bearded in her lair. Acteon run to earth for his transgression, and ripped apart by his own hounds, tastes his own medicine, swallows his pride along with the blood in his throat.
Assailed by space invaders high on the UT observation tower Charles Whitman invents the video game. Sights fixed on immortality he squeezes reloads squeezes. Pacmen Pacwomen pack animals vanish from the screen.
Black sedans glide around the monoliths invisible in the shadows cast by the southern Californian sun. Construction prototypes already the tarnished traces of a civilisation that imploded under its own futility. See how the gun emplacements point both ways.
Dank autumn nights
she silently stood
a hawk with a handsaw
deep in the woods
And deep in the woods
we wait for the day
the hunter becomes
fair game for the prey