By Rita Randazzo
Date: 25 September 1997

Shipwreck

It is like surviving
a nuclear holocaust
or being cast up
on a desert island.

Shell-shocked and
shipwrecked,
we wander the house
like a pair of cats,

Staring out the windows,
eating together in animal
misery, curling up by the
woodstove together

In dumb animal pain,
drifting like ghosts
through what used to be
our lives.

We await rescue, but there
is no boat on the horizon.
Perhaps one
will yet appear.

Perhaps one of us
will kill the other
for the only place
left in the lifeboat.

copyright 1994 by Rita Randazzo
from my chapbook "Feeding Herself"