Little rabbit, where are you going? You have bounded away, shaded under the long grasses and slept in hollows, and in trees owls and rodents together have watched you going, fast as the bullets that go, boom, from the cannons of men, big men and their little cannons, and you, running, little rabbit. Where you stopped in the glen, I was there not long ago, and I saw your paw prints in the wet soil at the water’s edge. You lapped up the brown water with your nervous tongue and went, gone, went. Where are you going?
We, in our burrow beneath the valley, lived in dirt with our neighbors, the moles, the moles and the worms and the hairy roots of trees. It was an airless, hot hole we lived in but when the thunder went boom, went, boom, we were safe underground.
Here in the valley, where the animals make familiar sounds, streams burbling, leaves playing the fiddle with the wind, and you said to me, what did you say to me? You said to me, I am staying, I am staying. So where are you going, little rabbit?
I watched your brown back vanish in the brush, your disappearance immediate to me, for I did not turn again when I turned the first time to return to the burrow, without you, without you, little rabbit. And I live in the roots, I live beside the moles and the blind worms and when the thunder goes, boom, I am here. And you said to me, come see me, come see me when I go, but you were staying, little rabbit.
And I am leaving in abundance to see where you are going. And I return with bushels of glimpses of you lost in the flight that belies knowing. I have days without you, and my nights are full of listening to the things running above ground, under the dark sky where the stars are going, brightly, going. And dreams of you in the wide valley I also have, more than dreams of my own. Where are you going, little rabbit, under the sky and behind the sun?
