An Elder said

‘How dare you mock the wolf?’
As we naive
sang her echo
to gather up those who went wandering.

Long ago
three hundred years
on this island
the price of a she-wolf’s head
was six pound of the British crown.
The fearful planters intimidated by the true sons and daughter of the countryside.
An Mac Tire
I cry for you; son of the wild.

Those strangers
shot the wolves
too proud not to be
the Apex predators.
The wolf mothers who managed the unknowable ways of Nature,
peppered with lead,
another inconvenience dealt with.

Those who came
in their hubris,
choosing the role of catalyst
stepped out of Harmony and into Hierarchy
and ripped open an abyss.

Those cowards,
in their affair with gold and cattle
sold out the drum and rattle
unsang the songs of Harmony.
They theorised of invisible hands in markets,
rather than dreaming the ways of the land
or weaving the cradle and basket.
Caught up
on the unholiness of the wilderness,
the endless noughts and crosses of oughts and exhaustive measures
to make sure they stay right up there,
with the ferocity of the predator,
that sees all Creation as fair game.

It’s so often I forget the names
of caterpillars, birds and weeds
and swear to myself that
reverence cannot become a memory
and is the howl a call
or a cry
of agony?
Of one who disappeared from our minds
Guardian of Our Wild
now romanticised
mythologised
seen only in the sanitised pages of story books
and the alien flickering of screens.

So now brothers and sisters
you tell me;
can we howl the wolf home with reverence?
Or first must we burst open with her cry
and call in holy
her feral song to keen?