(It’s happening again. The guilt
starts eating me alive…)

Predawn, coffee brewing, two days
of painting a daughter’s room, completed.
First trip to the bathroom suddenly
ricochets into horror!

There were screams of pain from outside,
screams such as I’ve never heard before,
screams, which chilled my soul...

Paralyzed by knowledge, I knew
it was a rabbit. And I knew six of the cats
had spent the night haunting the dark.
What I didn’t know was how.

(How can this be happening? Again? A
moment of lapsing maybe creating another
senseless death…)

My heart pounded viciously in my chest,
punishing my flesh with bio-linked finesse,
mirroring my mind’s spiraling depths
as I raced out back, to the rabbit pens.
Four cats were half-circled behind the tall
rabbit hutch, whose door hung open.
Sweetpea, our Netherland dwarf female,
under the gangly hedge lining the back
of the house, crouched, scared and shocky.
I had to get to her, I had to grab her,
but, would she let me?

(Alec, last year’s personalitied rabbit, was
prostrate with heat stroke when I found him,
flanks heaving, eyes, glazing…)

Cats backed off to either side, I knew
the first attempt was crucial, I shook a bag
of yogurt chips, her favorite treat, as I reached
under the hedge for her shivering form,
and got her by the nape, lifting her quickly
and placing her in her high-rise pen.
I was shaking so badly, I started crying,
but felt a sense of relief she was alive.

I checked on the separated baby bunnies
and the father, and cursed and yelled at
the cats, like they were murdering sadists
instead of instinct-driven animals. The
duplicity, the atrocity was mine, not theirs.

(Alec lived for five minutes after I found him,
I blew my breath into his foaming mouth
and nose, but he was too far gone, his organs
shutting down, he died in my arms…)

After I had gathered my wits, and my guilt,
I went back out to check on her, and saw
a wound on the back of her leg. The reason
for the high-pitched squeals of rabbit-pain,
bringing images to my quaking mind
of Nazi’s surrounding a Jew, getting ready
to shoot, of pitiless eyes filling rice paddies
with dying cries, tortured flesh, and bones,
of genocide and intolerance and cruelty.

We’re leaving town for ten days, on vacation,
my daughter, gone, she doesn’t know of my
uninnocent crime, yet. I hate the myriad ways
life has to die, it fragments my soul, and I
wonder why circumstances, defined by acts or not,
rule all lives on this planet, doling out pain
and death, like a God.

It seems a small thing, innocent irresponsibility
in a rabbit’s death, but, it’s not. It’s a reflection
of the duality of humanity. Aren’t we ‘innocently
irresponsible’ when we turn away from obvious
injustices in the world, when we keep our doors
shut, because the injustices are far from our lives,
from directly touching our everyday routines?
We know there are cats outside, circling rabbits
in the predawn light, and we keep our doors shut,
until, one day, screams are heard through the walls
of our homes. Why do rabbits have to scream in agony
to get our conscious attention?

(Alec’s death was due to my oldest daughter’s and
my innocent irresponsibility, Jerry the Gerbil, by
me and my youngest daughter’s innocent irresponsibility.
This time, I am entirely to blame for Sweetpea getting hurt…)

I don’t know how people who murder can stand themselves
when they kill without consciencent-culpability, anyone who murders
life murders themselves. Everything living is connected by
the very fact of ‘Being Alive’. A gestalt different from
other gestalts, like rocks or stars or mathematics. We are
the repleted placement of raw essence embodied in biologic
forms, imbued with cognizance, able to utilize other gestalts.

People will say ‘it’s not your fault’, ‘get over it’, ‘get on with
life’, ‘don’t dwell on it’. I don’t get over it, I think not embracing
our acts and actions, or letting others acts and actions stay locked
outside our doors, is contributing to a world without peace,
to people without respect for life, to souls lost within themselves.
To the degradation of the human race and the petrifying of
that precious raw essence. I feel my culpability with the total power
of its word-life. Because, words, each word, has a life,
a meaning, a perspective. Actions have a life, subdivided
by the word-lives of each action. So many, many actions
live on this world.

(It’s later, Pea looks better, she’s eating, and the glassy tears
lining the bottom of her shocked eyes are gone. I feel an
easement of my culpable anxiety…)

It is pouring rain, here, as I sit just inside the front door
on a patio chair, the wind slanted the rain and I was getting
wet. The overflow from the roof has created a river across
the patio, and I observe a midsize beige moth, helplessly,
up-side down, floating by. I go to give this moth my finger, which
it clings to, and set it in a safe place to wait out the storm.
It falls, unsteady, so I pick it up and try again. It stays.

Though not a beautiful butterfly, this moth will live
to flap its wings another day. And, I think, with this
action, maybe I’ve changed the world, for the better.

Erin Elizabeth Kelly-Moen
© Copyright 8/15/05