A Duck

The duck

The duck had an ugly patch of blood on its back.
No feathers, just gore and skin, neat oblong, razed
like a mown graveyard plot in the midst of a moor.
It didn't complain, not so much as a quack
of pain: it just sat there in silence, and gazed
at the water's edge, somehow distracted, unsure.
When we got there, it was surrounded by kids.
"The other ducks did that,"one of them said
though we hadn't asked. The bird was far gone:
we could easily have touched it, also closed its lids
forever - a sharp blow to the side of the head
with a stone would have done it. We let it live on.

(After all, there'd be wardens around for a start -
and anyway, who'd be the first to say "kill"?
But none of us liked ourselves much late that night.)
As for the kids and their possible part
in this crime, that remains indeterminate still.
It seems just as likely the bird had a fight
with its fellows and lost, and they, to seal its fate,
cast out of their number the one that was weak,
unsuited to live in this duck eat duck age,
and marked it as dogmeat, to propitiate
the predator's canines or claws or hooked beak.
Perhaps it was meant to have lived in a cage.

Put the duck on the right and the kids in the centre
and an open air caf? a few yards to the left.
Fill the caf? with summer Sunday outing folk.
Give them bright gaudy clothes, let's say green and magenta,
have them sip coffee, put in some other deft
touch, like a dandled baby, drifting smoke.
Now turn it around, left to right, make it sepia,
pull the duck and the kids in towards the caf?
until balcony-like, the elements overlap,
with gouged contours and streaks, considerably creepier.
Now turn it back, leave the distances as they
were, replace colours partially, map
the duck twice, add a hunted fox and a snake..
Do not neglect the symbolic fountain in the lake
or the sky, or sun, or the water in the lake.