FIRST PLACE WINNER : Origami Poems Kindness Contest 2017
I hear her voice calling
by Daun Daemon
I hear my mother’s voice calling
all 85 years of love, ache, and worry
calling into the vacant, lonely air
Blackie Blackie Blackie
getting no response, no soft padding of paws
through bone dry leaves, no barely heard
feline trill of here I come
I hear your voice calling
when she tells me over two hundred miles
of telephone line that a neighbor
waited all day to call about seeing Blackie
Laying in that ditch out there this morning
hit by a car whose driver didn’t slow
for a cat on his morning rounds
I hear her voice calling
when she tells me about phoning town hall
asking the man who answered
what did they do with my Blackie?
what do they do with the animals by the road
and I know she couldn’t say the word dead
I hear her voice calling
when she says she told the man
I want to bury him here at home
in the back yard with my other cats
I think no no no no no and wait
for her to weep as she tells me
the awful truth, that dead cats are thrown
in the dump with all the other trash
I hear her voice calling
when she doesn’t weep only tells me
in the saddest, softest mother’s voice
he said they have places out in the country
where they bury animals, nice places
but he didn’t know where Blackie got buried
I think what a mercy from a stranger
whose job is to speak plain about dead cats
that even over the telephone
he heard my mother’s voice calling
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Daun Daemon 2017
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Daun Daemon grew up in Hudson, NC, and has spent most of her life in the Old North State. Daemon’s fiction has appeared in Sassy, Kalliope, Creative Loafing, and Fiction Fix among others; along with a number of poems in the Haiku Journal. She teaches scientific communication at NC State University and lives in Raleigh, NC, with her husband, three house cats, one half-feral porch cat, and a geriatric Border Aussie.
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- Read this and the other 60+ poems in 'The Best of Kindness 2017' available on Amazon or from the CreateSpace e-store: https://www.createspace.com/7018282
