The three legged deer was sleeping in the backyard last night, huddled against the south wall of the house on a patch of bare ground near the dryer vent. I startled it when I opened the back door to feed the three jet black feral cats who were eagerly awaiting their breakfast. Snow is thick on the ground and their water dish was frozen solid.
The deer jumped up with a clatter, startling me in return, and moved, spryly for its injured condition, around to the driveway.
I went to look out the window and saw it browsing on some dead grass poking through the snow. Its front left hoof dangled uselessly, flapping like a piece of rag as it moved.
I had seen the deer this summer just after it was hit and wounded by a car. It was staying close to the side of the road where the accident had happened, and the other deer were sticking close by it, trying to keep it as part of the herd. But months later now, in the cold, it’s on its own. Still moving, still surviving, but sheltering close to the house at night to try to keep out of range of the coyote hordes. I saw blood and deer fur on the rail trail a few days ago, just across the road by the canal ruins along the creek.
The news of the political turmoil that reaches me from my radio and phone has me feeling like a three legged deer: stunned, injured, in shock. By will and habit I keep going on with the routine work of survival. Slowly, haltingly, I persevere. The uncertainty and tenuousness of the future hovers over everything like a gray winter sky.
My mind finds a song to remind me of the universality of my experience. The songs like deer in the herd are all around me, unseen but present.
“Mi verso es de un ciervo herido
Que busca en el monte amparo”
“My verse is a wounded doe
Who seeks shelter in the mountain”
“Con los pobres de la tierra
Quiero yo mi suerte echar "
“With the poor folk of the world
I will cast my lot”
“Y para el cruel que me arranca
El corazon con que vivo
Cardo ni ortiga cultivo
Cultivo la rosa blanca”
“And for the cruel one
Who wrenches out the heart
Which gives me life
I cultivate neither thistles nor nettles
I cultivate the white rose”
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From “Guantanamera” by Marti/Fernandez/Orbon
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