Twelve Dollar Bow and Arrow

He only just thought of it, this
young boy, pants stained with
dirt and grass, a stick caught in
his tousled hair, his twelve
dollar bow and arrow clutched
tightly as a religious icon against
his hip,

but he has lost his way, and doesn’t
know his north from his west, and
twilight is leaping across the sky like
escaped panthers from the zoo, after
him, the rabbit of their attention,

and the way back doesn’t look like
the way coming to this point, and
he never counted the number of times he
bore right and bore left, or if the
moss grew on only one side of the
big trees with their knotty bark,

and he knows that there is no one
to hear him call out, for he has
walked back from the woods
behind the graveyard where
men from the civil war were put
to rest, and the roads don’t go
this way, not since the logging
trails grew in when his own
father was a boy,

and a game bird flushes out from a
thicket as a small sound escapes him
seeming like thunder in the quiet of
the wood, his heart responding in kind,
his feet slipping as he leaps back and
topples to the soggy earth,
and he looks up at the moon, the
silvery round eye above him, feeling
no mercy at all, feeling that this
being lost has only begun, and will
stretch out forever like rivers below
the earth and the highways of the
hidden folk his grandma told him
about,

and he holds his bow in sweaty
hands, this boy, and the world
swells up so huge and awful
above him that his shoulders
shake underneath his shirt,
but he blinks at the tears and
picks a direction, because
walking is a little less scary than
lying still.