That Nature Yet Remembers

I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty;
I woke, and found that life was duty.
(Ellen Sturgis Hooper, Beauty and Duty)

I'm outwardly a human shape
By nature melancholic,
But in my head is where are spread
The fields in which I frolic.

In dreams I race across the grass
To burrows underground,
Where Rabbits play, both night and day,
In darkness safe and sound.

But danger stalks the outer world
Wherever I may roam,
And fox's breath - the stench of death
Is never far from home.

Then morning comes with bright new dawn
I lie awake in bed,
No longer paws nor needle claws
But human hands instead.

Though when I walk upon the hills
Should Rabbits wander near,
I stop and stare, and then and there
I try to catch their ear.

I'll speak to them in their own tongue,
In Lapine, I should say,
And though they cannot talk to man
They'll listen all the day.

The sheer elation that I feel
When speaking to my kind
(For that is how I know them now)
Is something rare to find.

It's odd but now I come to tell
About what I have gained,
A Rabbit phenotype for me
Seems almost preordained.

So come with me along the runs
And burrow deeply down
In Nature's mix with thousand tricks
We Rabbits wear the crown!

That Nature Yet Remembers has an interesting history. It was written in the autumn of 2002, before I really understood what furriness was, let alone how it applied to me. For a variety of reasons, its initial publication on FictionPress was under the pseudonym "AndrewB". At that stage, the poem also sported an excruciatingly bad first stanza, which thankfully has been removed in the version you see here. Once I was sure of myself as a fur, there seemed no reason to continue the fiction that the poem was anything other than my own work, and so it was moved to the "Loganberry" account. Thence it came to Bits'n'Bob-stones, and finally to this site, almost a year after its first public appearance.