I told you, I sometimes write poems about things
that they have not been popularly written about before.
This is a group of poems-- there are four--
called the shapeshifter poems.
Do you know what a shapeshifter is?
A werewolf is an example of a shapeshifter.
A shapeshifter is something--
one-- that all of a sudden, for some reason,
becomes something else.
And it's very frightening.
And you may be able to tell what these poems are about,
shapeshifter poems.
One.
The legend is whispered in the women's tent.
How the moon, when she rises full,
follows some men into themselves and changes them there.
The season is short but dreadful.
Shapeshifters, they wear strange hands.
They walk through the houses at night,
their daughters do not know them.
Two.
Who is there to protect her from the hands of the father?
Not the windows which see and say nothing.
Not the moon, that awful eye.
Not the woman she will become with her scarred tongue.
Whoo, whoo, whoo, the owl laments into the evening.
Who will protect her, this pretty little girl?
Three.
If the little girl lies still enough,
shut enough, hard enough, shapeshifter
may not walk tonight.
The full moon may not find him here.
The hair on him bristling, rising up.
Four.
The poem at the end of the world is the poem the little girl
breathes into her pillow, the one she cannot tell,
the one there is no one to hear.
This poem is a political poem, is a war a poem,
is a universal poem, but it is not about these things.
This poem is about one human heart.
This poem is the poem at the end of the world.