From The Shadows

I crept out at night from our hiding place and squeaked a bit when it was very still

The powerful lay in temperature-controlled leisure before the holy big screens

Their angry bellowing and trumpeting kept me fearful in my darkened hiding place

I scurried about gathering a few of their scraps for food and to build a tiny nest

Sometimes when they would see me they acted as if I were not there

Other times I saw my tiny brothers left limp and broken in the dank urban desolation

Their power was so vast and all-encompassing that they were as gods to us

The completeness of their dominance left them as doubtless as we were hopeless

I rejoiced when I could steal back home with one or another of their castoffs

I knew how to stay very still and remain concealed as they trampled heavily on by

We made no issues with the gutted landscape they had created in their images

We prospered as well upon their increased wastes, the richer they felt they grew

They totally ignored us but slaughtered many of us in simple unnoticed accidents

We stole their tiny golden eggs at every rare opportunity

We did not know they made noise just to interfere with each other’s thinking

Sometimes we furtively hung posters of our churlish, clandestine manifestos

I piped out my shrill rage with all my puny lungs in the safety of our filthy warren

Fought tiny but brutal battles over under-nourished, whining females

Did not make so much as a sound as their ponderous footsteps approached again

Saw others crushed beneath the massive metal monsters those gods rode within

Though our fate was sealed long before we were even born, we trilled our reservations

We worshiped them in fear, never harboring a thought of usurping their grandeur

While we left nothing lasting, the signs of their dominance remained for centuries

Though sad to say not a trace was left by the time the next geologic epoch had begun

I spent a lifetime wet and caked with putrid mud without any promise of salvation

We were glad to be overlooked when they cast about for yet another enemy

I made my living darting from cranny to shadow when they were not around

Little remains of our existence except the legends from that era so very long ago

When I died, but one of the pups that I had sired still lived to sniff my dirty corpse

They had overturned our hidden nest and casually slaughtered us as we scattered

I had been in mourning as my sweet dam had succumbed to a poisoned bait

They never knew we bore the insects that carried the virus that took them down