A NECESSARY VIOLATION                                      

I pled with him not to set the traps to snap
the puny necks by night, but he did it again anyway.
I was always first to greet the gruesome success.

Once, when my daughter was three months old,
she was howling, strapped securely in her carrier,
perched on the coffee-table in front of cartoons.

Suddenly, silence:  no child-seat, no baby,
as if by abduction, as if to teach me
a lesson about being in the next room.

She was still strapped in the seat,
which had flipped upside down on the carpet,
and was startled but unscathed.
 
I took a picture of the limp mouse,
a necessary violation, scolding my husband,
sending him for humane traps.

Sometimes the mice make morsels disappear,
as, for a time, do they.  I sense them treading
gingerly, reaching with tiny too-human hands,

knowing, yet of course, not knowing,
as with a mother's dread approach
to an infant's imagined grave.

copyright Julianza K. Shavin