Kingdom, as Our Shelter or Grave

Their kingdom, towering and tainted with avarice,

Was the first place I learned to run from.

I crawled on all fours through the dirt, through the bramble, across freshwater rivers that smelled of a time long before ours,

My lips cracked and dry and the fur between my paws caked with mud.

I ran because they taught me to run.

I sought out hope because all that was left for me in their land was despair.

The sharp glare of their cold metal blades and the stinging alloy of their hollow-point glares seemed to say, “You are not welcome here, beast.”

And after I fled I swore to myself that those words, unspoken yet ringing all too clearly,

Would be the only ones from their mouths to which I would ever listen.

The shaking in my legs and the shiver in my spine remind me of when they first arrived.

Loading their lethal weapons, yelling gruff commands we could not understand, tainting the ocean’s shore with the unwelcome filth of their footprints.

The land upon which they walked had been our domain since time immemorial,

Yet when they set foot upon it they clipped our wings, hoisted us up by our beautiful tails,

Told us our names and what we were to be as if it was our duty to bow down.

As if their soulless, self-centered minds could ever know or understand us, they bound us in black and white and stripped us of our dignity,

Calling us boy, girl, he, she, it, beast, reducing what time knew as precious creatures to a mere curiosity, a conglomerate order of inferior beings which they saw as nothing more than playthings to satisfy their greed and thirst for cruelty.

“Nine coin for a necklace made of rabbit bones.”

“Twelve coin for a pound of venison.”

“Twenty coin for the fur pelt of a fox.”

What was once precious and sacred, by their selfish greed and piercing bullets had become nothing but a target, forced to stagger with matted fur, broken wings, and slit paws into hiding to retain the final scrap of dignity left in our mere breath.

Might I remind you, dearest creature to whom I speak, that we did not choose what we are. We did not choose to belong to the forest – it was the forest that chose us. We will not let them hold us down, harvest our fur for “good luck,” display our formaldehyde-filled corpses as trophies and say it is truth. It is cruelty. If we are to be hunted by those who stormed our kingdom and called us monsters, then let the forest that birthed us be our moonlight, our shelter, our treasure, our true story, so that we may never forget the meaning of peace or harmony. Silent creature, shivering in the cold, never forget your heritage, your homeland, your true colors, or the spirit of the forest that dwells within.

Never, ever forget what it means to be alive.