This is the year I learned to hate the moles,
the whole blind-tunneling, garden-raiding,
carrot-devouring, pea-sprout-munching,
rapidly reproducing, miserable movement of moles.
Not for a lifetime, but for an hour or two,
I would like to be an owl so I might
swoop down on their company in the dark
with my enormous silent wings and my sharp
and merciless beak. I would pluck their bodies
from the rows of beans with relentless precision
and I’d pull them apart, the young ones, too,
no, not for the joy of the massacre,
but because that is what I am born to do.
How free it must be to kill with no conscience,
to take their furry, soft-skinned lives
without tripping on compassion.
How much easier not to muse
about how a rodent’s got to eat something, too,
and why wouldn’t she want an organic carrot,
all crunchy and sweet, or a pea sprout or one hundred,
so tender, so green.