Moor Death

In a place they found lush with nature’s aesthetic sense,
A death stained a streambank with rotten flesh.
The carcass was returning to earth.
Its flesh had been vaporised, day by heating day.
Worms and flies now dined on its leftovers.

In ignorance of the death-stench invading the sweating air,
The lamb had staggered to death.
Lost its mother to break a leg.
Through rough ground it stumbled and stumbled more,
To spring from a grass-clod into a dirt-black bog.
This is where novice walkers moan for concrete-pleasure.
Close reeds, twice its height, had shielded it from the hawk above.
Then the lamb dragged itself out of the putrid mess 
And made its way to cleaner water.
A skull, in strange separation, hovered loose on a river-rock.
The lamb then laid down, exhausted.
It soon sniffed its own death in the air,
And let life seep out of its young bones.
Then the chill night air… and the hunger.

Just too many hours of hunger.
At last, a short life swiftly ended.