Youth group camp

The truck rattled over the dry paddock hills,
our spotlight eclipsed the huge dumb moon
and in the back all the boys gripped the bars
in a fever. God, where are we? I’m cold. The script
we’d absorbed convinced us we didn’t need
to learn the languages of foxes and rabbits.
We scanned the shadows for movement,
eyes wide and dry like gun barrels.      A flash
of fur, and for the boy who’d yell out a time
as an angle for the shooter a strange
honour would silently gather.       The gun’d
crack an amen, and the truck’d lurch
toward the blood.     What’s this crucifix doing
round my neck?     I swear, that night I must’ve seen
five or six bolt across the beam in the hope of rocks
or burrows, but other voices called their bluff.
How far are we from home?      Which way is it?
The final sad tally was one grey feral cat,
proudly shot and dumped on the truck tray
that was our swaying floor.         Its open jaw
drooled a small red pool, and I   couldn’t move,
just stared myself    out into the dark.        My
boy heart banged its head   against the bars,
a morse signal    the size of the shrinking heat
beneath the fur, beneath my own homeless skin.
God, please don’t let it leap up to scratch at my ankles.
Back at the farm,    around the bonfire,       stories
were kneaded and    swelled to fit the shape
of a myth  that never existed and  still  grips
the world.        God, when will this be over?
Twenty years         of decomposition,
  and these stubborn jigsaw shapes,
           decaying bones      and stained pelt,
spread out  now    on my mind’s   desk
            don’t yet fit.