Hare therapy

Shoes and accessory

Sure, they flinch at every noise

And throw a tantrum with their toys;

Bang their cages, nip their owners,

Spoil the gift to snub its donors;

Pee on what they know you covet

Just to make it clear, they love it;

Practice hard to stay a whelp

Just to taunt, so you can’t help.

But watch them closely, when they feel

No one plans to make a meal;

That no catastrophe can loom

In this silhouetted room.

Then you’ll find a gentler class

With other goals than to harass;

Prospects nobler, more germane

Than toiling just to be a bane.

When one flops, and lies unblinking,

Docile, purposeless, unthinking,

Lie beside it, and absorb

All the quiet of its orb;

Where no distraction, discontent

Makes chaos of its sole intent:

To charge the soul with emptiness,

And bid each new sensation, guess.

Go lie beside it; let it learn

Your body’s deep desire to burn

With cooler fires than language, reason,

Hot winds from the human season.

Its cataleptic credo quells

Any doctrine from our hells,

Where congregations twitch and writhe

To pay the absolution’s tithe.

No, there is consolation. Find it

In the animals who mind it;

Who, when unconscious, bid their heart

To make of innocence an art;

Listen closely to its beat,

Where you hear ancestral feet

Running out the mind’s unrest.

Lie beside it and be blessed.