For Shannon
I imagined that my God was a cougar,
taken from a Time-Life book,
and it would with its back
slouched and legs extended, crawl
up the mountain in form of penance,
and once it was on the summit,
my Cougar would sit and survey
the plains, I imagined how it would
be to stroke the tea tan coloured fur,
and the scuff of white under its chin,
how it would smile like the Tiger
in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle book,
and maybe it would talk and tell
me something cool, and explain
the meaning of why I had to go to school
where on Sunday we would kneel and pray,
and this was my private God, this
Cougar, he had no priests, only the trees
and shrubs posted the path to his heaven
and you know he only exists in my memory
as an afterglow of a sunset, as a testimony
to how it was for me, my dear Shannon.
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