Vixen
Poetry
Last spring a young fox found me
standing very still as she, for just
a few moments, had left her kits
alone in a nest of leaves under the
pink fluff of rhododendron bushes.
There, when she pranced out in her
black socks and full tail, I stood
dead-still, my camera already trained
on her because of the lush blooms
above her napping family’s nursery.
She noticed the “new thing” but,
after a quick nose-in-the-air sniff,
the vixen turned around twice, and
laid down with her foxy tail curled
toward her dark snout, as if to tell me,
“I see you; now stay right there.”
As she rested from the rigors of raising
kits while hiding in a very public garden,
I silently snapped beautiful photos of her,
lowered my gaze and left her to rest.
Pamela Brothers Denyes’ award-winning poems appear in multiple journals and international anthologies. Her full-length poetry collections, The Right Mistakes and The Widow’s Lovers, are available from Kelsay Books and Amazon. Pamela’s chapbook, As I Lay Dreaming, is available on her web site. Now retired, she's harvesting forty years of poetry journals to create new works—and fun! Reach her at www.pbdenyes.com.