Klauser was the craftiest
of all the beasts that called the forest home.
He was a fox, and every night he’d sneak
among the sleeping sylvan things and take
most anything his fancy wished to eat;
he thought his guile could outwit every trap.
Many animals laid traps
to snare Klauser, but none were craftier
than him: the poisoned acorns went unate;
when wolves prowled through the night, he robbed their homes;
the eggs birds booby-trapped he’d never take;
past every leaf-masked pit he’d always sneak.
“Let’s just kill this Klauser sneak!”
the wildcat snarled one day when sitting trapped
within a woods’ trap summit, “What’s it take
to do a little thing like that? what craft
has he when faced by all these woods now home,
for from the flesh of each this fiend now eats.”
Murder-lust now wholly ate
compassion in their hearts, nor did it sneak
away to make another organ home
but in Death’s icy fingers it died trapped.
And so, the mob set out feeling crafty
and vowing this time there’d be no mistakes.
No one knew where Klauser took
the many things he took from them to eat,
yet in the forest’s dark heart craftier
beings reside than can by pen be snuck
into the minds of beasts or men—they trapped
one such presence and asked the fox’s home.
“Crafty Klauser’s secret home
is solely known to Isabelle—he takes
great pleasure in, her company,” the trap
was giving way, “I mean,” with that it ate
its way out of the snare, to darkness snuck,
and never since has shown its craftiness.
They tracked her home while he was making tea—
they grasped his crafty skin: it ripped apart—
they took his courage: he became a snake.
Copyright © 2024 G.M.H. Thompson
All Rights Reserved
G.M.H. Thompson recently bought a Gibson Les Paul Custom for 13,500,000 đồng, so I guess you could say things are getting pretty serious. Do you wanna be cool? Then buy this book– it’s perfect for your coffee table!
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Amazon Best-Selling Author, Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir (EIF-Experiments in Fiction, 2022); Pushcart Nominee; Facebook: Barbara Harris Leonhard /barbara.leonhard; Instagram: @meelosmom123
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👏👏👏 delightful. 😜
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An intriguing poem, especially the ending.
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Thank you, G.M.H., for this imaginative fable!
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This is very creative and you completely got me with the ending. He outsmarted everyone in the end. I am so glad people don’t trap animals any more. It also moved me because reading it made me think of the animals and the true fact which means we continue taking away from them and their habitat. So that they don’t know where to go for food. Enjoyed your piece, thank you and by the way the red fox is a really pretty animal.
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Oh, thank you. I remember in Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust, there’s a crazy sequence where one of the characters captures a fox & it mates with a dog and there are fox-dog babies– I don’t know if that’s actually biologically possible; Faulkner was such a crazy writer. Also, Soviet scientists conducted a breeding experiment with foxes, breeding the more docile foxes together, and after only like one generation, the foxes were behaving more like dogs. Pretty wild.
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That is pretty wild, G.M.H.!
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