Foxlet

The little fox will grow a big fox, / Provided God will grant him life; / But to release him in the meantime / I think would be foolish indeed. / Two foxes that were but foxlets, as yet, / Quite young little things, / Were captured by chance / By the good Doctor Grumberg / On the Isles of Spitzbergen.

It flashed on me that I had come a month / Too late for trapping, that foxlets in the spring / May grow sharp teeth with the passing of a moon . . .

I remember reading while I was pregnant about emotions, and how I would become eloquently compassionate towards all living things, like the mother fox who ushers an orphaned bear cub to her breast with her other tiny foxlets.