What must the rabbits think, I wonder,
looking out from within the bunker of my kitchen
at the garden fence finally erected
just for them. It’s a monstrous construction
they have driven me to after weeks of running battles
over lettuces and leeks, rhubarb and Swiss chard,
which they’ve happily helped themselves to,
nibbling to nubs, shoots, and stalks
that once showed promise of flowering
fully into bountiful produce. My garden,
once green and flourishing, has been reduced
to naked dirt and desuetude by their incessant chewing,
and no fake rubber snakes coiled menacingly
among the foliage, no chimes hanging from fishing lines
overhead, have deterred these ravening raiders
from their ruthless pillaging.

I imagine them hopping blithely to their next feed
only to find themselves staring in from without
through one hundred square feet of laminated,
reinforced mesh fencing—the finest
my money could buy from the local hardware—
at lush new re-plants (replacing those they’d devoured)
so deliciously close but out of reach. I want them
to feel the frustration I have felt, which drove me
to such desperation that my backyard now resembles
a demilitarized zone between warring countries.
I want them to suffer as I have suffered,
the ignominy of wanting something they can’t have,
knowing that the world has turned hard and mean.

I catch my breath and watch a rabbit approach
from the tangle of bridal wreath alongside the garage,
watch him hop, stop, sniff and stare at the wire
suddenly there before him. This is it, I think, that moment
he realizes his pitiful place in the scheme of things,
up against a superior intellect, an apex predator,
a top-of-the-food-chain warrior stud. I feel
almost sorry for the little long-eared fuzz-ball
in all his puny, hapless, pathetic rabbityness—
until he stretches his body out thin as a stick
and wriggles under the wire lickety-split,
leaving me looney-tunes, channeling my inner Fudd.


© by Mike Orlock.
Used with the author’s permission.