The welcome wagon shields us from the weather.
With four-wheel drive and food-chained every tyre,
we roll like lords across the lochs and heather
and (‘Pull!’) down birds of clay and those with feather,
their throats a song, their eyes on something higher.
We throw the clay away and cook as fryer
the latter bird. This makes us feel we’re free
of both, and by extension have to be
the kings of all we see from oil-slicked sea
to town and back, and all that lies between.

Our hubris is amusing to the leopard
who licks his chops while we crouch down to clean
our prey and pray the cat’s grin does not mean
what we are sure it does: our history’s peppered
with tales of cats less fond of sheep than shepherd.
We, sport killers, easily equate
with the urges of this feline and his mate
who’ve always killed more monkeys than they ate.
Monkey’s minor when a leopard feasts.
A proper meal, and sport, requires an ape.

Baboons will do. Chimpanzees, arrivistes,
make curious cuts—but on the geests
and other meadows we and leopards share
we are their favourites: slow and thin of hair.
Each day, somewhere, some leopard will explain
to one of us, alert through fright and pain,
our place in nature’s predatory chain.
Those of us the leopard’s personally taught
are oft consumed with interest in the topic
which means the leopard’s lessons come to naught.

Big-head chimpanzees claim the leopard’s tropic
and put on airs and clothes. Should they be caught
and eaten, their survivors say they ought
to have stayed inside the car, or heeded horoscopic
intelligence, or been ornithoscopic
enough to know the leopard’s not unkind
but (he’s our cousin) similarly inclined
to follow courses we’ve ourselves outlined:
killing what we can in every weather
as if the food chain cannot ever tire.