I offered this lovely video/poem as a prompt in one of my workshops.
Here is what I wrote in response:
Coyote Wedding
After Brittani Sonnenberg
I have been. Bald in my hunger. Thing is. Appetites do subside. Thank someone for that—goddess, maybe. The biological imperative that sent me reeling into arms, into beds, down foreign streets, searching, a silent howl… that bit’s over now.
I never bit anyone—not enough to draw blood, that is. But years of hunger found me feasting at three, fifty, a thousand tables. Is someone counting?
I hear coyotes yipping at night when passing vehicles finally go home to sleep. Moon or no moon, those rascals let me know that they are still hungry. That they’d feast on my chickens if I had some, would take my cats by the scruff if I let them out at night. Was that me—carrying men off in my jaws? Once, after I’d let another man loose (or he’d let me), a chef where I worked asked me, “What do you do to these men?” I didn’t have an answer then, but maybe I was too ravenous, my appetite unmanageable.
I’m more lion than coyote or wolf, but a wolf spoke to me, its muzzle tasting the air when I drove by. I stopped then and came to stand close enough to smell her wildness. Her jewel eyes fixed on me, she stood lightly on the dust of snow. I stilled my heart so I could hear. She’d been waiting. This I saw in the paw prints after she left. It wasn’t that she’d been waiting to cross the road, no. She looped around to return to the woods.
Those woods are gone now, replaced by houses stacked in rows with mere threads of green and no breath between.
Back in my car, I wept. I wasn’t able to translate but knew I’d been given a gift. Only later, when the test I’d just had came back clear of disease, did I begin to understand. It was a hiatus, a pause in my healing, though, and that’s why she’d come. How a wolf might say, “Stay steady. Don’t give up.”
Ah, there I was writing about hunger—for mating, for sex, some feast of romantic love I could never stomach for long—and there I ended up where I often do—at the roadside with the wolf who tried to tell me, “Be patient. Wait, because I’ll be coming home.”
And when he did come, against all odds, as they say, I named my son, Meenghun, a misspelling of the Ojibwe word for wolf.
What then had I truly hungered for? Home, simply. A place to rest and to be known.
To prepare for my son’s arrival, I left the city for this quiet place by the river, this place where when he was two years old, he said, “I love my home. This is the best world. I’m never leaving.”
And so it is. I am home now, my hunger a simple one—for what is before me, a piece of toast, a meal with friends; each day one of gratitude.
I invite you to write your response to this video poem. It could spark the impulse to write a poem or an essay, or possibly a piece of fiction about groceries, love, wild animals… or any other aspect that stayed with you.
Comments are open, so if you’d like to share, I’d be delighted.
Hi Deepam, I just want to howl. I love this piece and the video poem that inspired it.