Big cats peer through tall grasses, alertly blinking.
Grazing animals scent death stalking far too near.
The hyena looks for trouble in its nightly slinking.
Mouse mothers teach their mice to check their rear
and to keep an eye out for a certain shadow sinking,
which is the subtle clue that claw and beak are here.

The only relief found between winter snow and summer dust
is that primordial fear alternates equally with procreative lust.

The male bird’s bright collared, feathery plume,
the ram’s thick, genetically cushioned, horny head,
the insert’s pheromones, the lovebird’s starlit room
are strategies to bring that specie’s mate to bed
and is the competition of instincts we assume
to reproduce the living, and the dead.

We learn how this love first exhilarates and then exhausts.
The price paid for our sexuality is that independence is lost.

Love’s hardest lessons are learned in life’s brutality
in the animal kingdom, as in watery schools,
experiencing blood-lust and rutting sexuality
in ruts predetermined by instinctual rules –
but there is higher learning of a sort in actuality,
in the meadows, forests, rivers, plains and pools.

Mothers nurture little ones and defend their young,
even sacrificing their lives for the many in the one.