Because I never learned how

to be gentle and the country

I lived in was hard with dead

animals and men, I didn't question

my father when he told me

to step on the kitten's head

after the bus had run over

its hind quarters

Now, twenty years later,

I remember only:

the silence of the dying

when the fragile skull collapsed

under my hard bare heel,

the curved tongue in the dust

that would never cry again

and the small of my father's back

as he walked tall away