JUDAS  FOR A DAY                        

I had volunteered at the shelter for nearly a year,
a grim, grimy, dim-lit hellhouse at the edge of town,
cleaning, letting the dogs out for their weekly exercise,
publishing long pleading articles in the local paper.
Rural towns are rife with abandoned animals,
on roads, live or dead, maimed, starving, sore-infested,
puppies bagged and discarded, suffocating in dumpsters. 

Once, a volunteer could not make it, so I was summoned.
A whole new batch were arriving, and room
was needed at the gruesome inn.
We loaded the truck with eleven barking pups
ecstatic back in the truck bed, in the air, the sun.
Then, two escaped and I was told to round them up
I hesitated: why not let them have their freedom?
but that simply meant protracted doom.
I brought them back.
 
As the needle entered each, I held their ignorant bodies,
looked into their eyes. 
They had not known such love in ages. 
One by one, they grew slack, crumpled.
But the last was worst, his huge hulk somehow
unlike the others wasting like deflating balloons. 
I hung on to his warm pulsing body as though
it were my own, and then it was over.
His eyes glassed like all the rest, a noble creature
brought down by one ounce of fluid.

By spring, life was growing in my belly.
The animals lept at me like tigers,
so I had to depend on my words to save them. 
Failure grew in me, ectopic, threatening  implosion.
Deep inside, impalpable, the clump of cells steadily
grew, itself straining towards sun.

The animals came and went, alive or spent.
I saved all their pictures;  joyful creatures
frolicking on twenty square feet of grass,
noses poking through chain link, sad dewy eyes,
canine mothers dutifully nursing their doomed litters.
I'll never forget the eleven -- holding them tight,
massaging their ears, easing them from fur and flesh
straight into the realm of glory,
all of our hearts breaking, one of us
left behind, to pass down the stories.

Copyright Julianza K. Shavin 2009