THE RAT

It affronts my sense of Home;

facing me fully with its quintessential Rat-ness;

but it’s not my enemy, my foe

nor yet my pet or possession.

It’s an uninvited intruder

and puts me squarely in a pose

of murderous doing;

 I have been confronted before,

with all the shortcut solutions and diversions

that warriors are familiar

and not comfortable with.

Surely, the term and length of any living being

is not up to our mortal decree,

whatever the excuses.

Our territories’ supposedly  inviolability

whether on behalf of or result of battlefields or larders. 

I have dragged dying donkeys

off to veterinary death doulas,

done my best to drown abandoned puppies, 

kill rabid cats,

resorted every which way for escapes or diversions,

To not see what I saw

to walk away, switch off.

As  farm kids, we were wont

 - and able -

to bash rats in the barn,

gallop over half dead miximestosis rabbits -

ensuring we humanely finished them off

with a stick or stirrup.

So I should be properly conditioned for this executioner's job.

Used to taking dogs off for

dispatching jabs,

or horses, those beloved creatures,

put euphemistically “to sleep” as our human needs decreed.

I had resorted to asking the ant-kingdom politely with

literally, sweet enticements  

to house themselves elsewhere,

beyond the reach of crawling babes:

I recollect a shamanic friend who was wont to ask snakes

respectingly

to move from her path in the Ozzy bush.

I am duly reminded of my craven command

to my beloved boys

to summarily dispatch a nest of bald rat-babies, 

secreted inside my gas cooker top:

I will never forget their mothers’ backward look to me

as the lads pursued her out the door:

she ran along the wall, shinning up the sewage vent,

returning to her well-known drains.

For ensuing weeks, I kept all,  loos

firmly battened down, or else..

The menu for killing rats is long

and horribly inventive.

As a society we don’t blink at killing them in laboratories, for research or experiment;

by obscene strategies and slow poison,

but they are survival-smart,

at home in tunnels and drains,

and physiologically, they can genetically mutate

to outwit our self-serving strategies

and well-intended humane endeavours.

Now, ah me, once again I am confronted;

off to find a mega-effective trap

for a big, fat rat - for which, it proved, 

I had been feeding inadvertently.

alongside the guinea pigs rightful due.