Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard

Carols by Candlelight at Taronga Zoo
where perplexed captive things listen
to the clever apes wailing praise to their God,
and my daughter and I slip away to find
the Snow Leopard in the gathering dusk.
We stand alone at the empty cage:
grass, a jumble of rocks, a felled tree -
we are just turning away from the bars
when something whispers over the grass
and the cage is filled with radiant life.

Lithe, fine-chiselled, her thick rich fur
a composition in pastels, grey and beige;
she is like a wraith in the twilight;
she drifts like smoke over the rocks
and stances, her pale eyes assessing us,
dismisses us and crouches to drink.
The zoo seems to have fallen mute:
we hear distinctly the steady dab-dab
of her quick tongue in the cool water,
the fall of droplets from whiskers and chin.

She drinks long, then raises herself
and gazes away nowhere, or inwards, perhaps,
over the lost foothills of the Karakoram;
and stretches in profile, posing on a bough,
head up, her soft nose twitching at alien air.
For long moments my child and I stand still,
afraid to move, and then in the distance
the singing starts and she is not there.
Night falls. We wander back to the lights,
past restless cages where dim shapes stir.

Back in the world of man the voices rise,
claiming the Creation and the right to make
God in our image. It is our grim dominion
we praise in the sad garden of survivors,
where every creature is a refugee
from a world we have made a nightmare.
The Snow Leopard burns in my thoughts,
and I wrestle with the mystery of a Mind
which could fill the earth with things of grace
and abandon them to my cruel race.