PAD Challenge Day 26

Today is "Poem in Your Pocket Day", and my online friend and haiku poet extraordinaire Cara Holman has a special blog post today featuring a variety of poems, including my Fibonacci poem "Big Picture".  Check it out here.

Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWriMo: (1) Write an animal poem, and (2) write an elegy.  I'm glad to have a relatively easy challenge after some tough ones the last couple of days, but I recently wrote a poem called "Elegy for Two Finches", which came in second a few months ago in Robert Brewer's  Tritina Challenge on the Poetic Asides blog.  So it took a little while to come up with another idea in that vein, but here it is:

Elegy for Roadkill

To the several squirrels

I’ve seen in the street this spring

not quite quick enough

to dodge deadly tires;

to the Canada goose

near the shopping mall

a riot of black and gray feathers;

to the large mammal I couldn’t identify

on the center line of the highway,

brown fur matted by the rain,

the size of a dog, but not a dog

(perhaps a groundhog or beaver –

I couldn’t see your face)

lying on your side as though sleeping;

to the poor box turtle

who never stood a chance,

shell smashed like an oversized walnut:

I am sorry for my small part in this –

I drive the roads you cross,

I’ve sped as quickly as your killers,

and, God help me, in my lifetime

I’ve taken out a few of you myself.