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“The Homecoming of Daniel Usherswell” by Rob MacWolf
Today I’m reading you a poem by Rob MacWolf, who isn’t about to do something like introducing himself, and you can find more of his poetry on on his SoFurry page.
Read for you by Khaki, your faithful fireside companion.
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https://thevoice.dog/episode/the-homecoming-of-daniel-usherswell-by-rob-macwolf
Transcript
You’re listening to Pride Month
Speaker:on The Voice of Dog. I’m Khaki, your faithful fireside companion,
Speaker:and Today I’m reading you a poem by Rob MacWolf,
Speaker:who isn’t about to do something like introducing himself,
Speaker:and you can find more of his poetry on
Speaker:on his SoFurry page.
Speaker:It’s a metaphor, ultimately.
Speaker:For being outcasts who find strength in eachother.
Speaker:For coming from all the places we come from that never expected to see someone like us.
Speaker:For being shapeshifters, who let nobody but ourselves decide what we are.
Speaker:For being feared.
Speaker:For being thought monsters.
Speaker:And for finding our way home in spite of it all.
Speaker:Please enjoy “The Homecoming of Daniel Usherswell”,
Speaker:a poem by Rob MacWolf
Speaker:The town of Good Intentions was respectable and quiet,
Speaker:As respectable and quiet as many towns that languish
Speaker:In the once remarkable, but no more remarked, rolling grasslands.
Speaker:The roads that once led out from it
Speaker:lay still and sullen silent,
Speaker:For few indeed had reason, now, to visit Good Intentions,
Speaker:And many who departed it
Speaker:did so without returning.
Speaker:It was indeed proverbial,
Speaker:that roads from Good Intentions
Speaker:Led not to anywhere that one returned from.
Speaker:In the morning The elders of the town (there were not many)
Speaker:met for coffee
Speaker:And talked of how the younger generations were not staying.
Speaker:At sunset the lone stoplight, on the crossroads at town center,
Speaker:The lone and only stoplight
Speaker:in all Minnehacqua County,
Speaker:Ceased changing red and green,
Speaker:instead showed only flashing yellow.
Speaker:And you could be forgiven,
Speaker:if you looked on, tourist-curious,
Speaker:For judging that the days when things might happen were behind it,
Speaker:Before you went your way again, down any dusty highway
Speaker:From the town of Good Intentions,
Speaker:in the endless dusty grasslands.
Speaker:But intentions, good or otherwise,
Speaker:to providence are nothing,
Speaker:To chance or fate or providence
Speaker:or whatever you call it.
Speaker:And any day may be the day that anything might happen.
Speaker:And when it finally happens, well, it has to happen somewhere.
Speaker:So came the fearsome morning,
Speaker:on the town of Good Intentions,
Speaker:One cold-front threatening day in June, while yet the moon was waxing,
Speaker:That brought the Pack upon them,
Speaker:like a storm across the grasslands.
Speaker:Oh the Pack came down the highway, with a thunder in their engines
Speaker:With the thunder in their engines and the wind beside them racing,
Speaker:With the wind like flowing water
Speaker:over bare arms and bare torsos,
Speaker:With a growling in their throats not to be heard above their engines.
Speaker:What a fear was on the townsfolk,
Speaker:for they knew (by reputation,)
Speaker:What the Pack could surely do, if but their anger was awakened,
Speaker:If their anger or their hunger
Speaker:once awakened, stretched its muscles,
Speaker:And shook its shaggy head,
Speaker:and yawned displaying wicked canines, And leapt a wolven leap out of the bed where it had slumbered,
Speaker:The bed shaped like a human,
Speaker:where lately it had slumbered
Speaker:While the human was its dream and its illusion.
Speaker:Thus the townsfolk, Did shut the doors and shut the blinds and peer between the curtains.
Speaker:As thundering down the highway,
Speaker:the wind beside them singing,
Speaker:The Pack in grim procession came,
Speaker:on unthinkable business.
Speaker:The foremost was a terror.
Speaker:He came on in faded leather,
Speaker:In leather greyed and grizzled with how many hundred highways.
Speaker:In the stubble on his cheek
Speaker:and in the mane above his temples One could read the very color of the pelt he wore within him,
Speaker:Of the pelt wicked and wolfish,
Speaker:grey and grizzled as the roadside.
Speaker:He led them down the highway,
Speaker:to the square before the courthouse,
Speaker:Onto the square of cobbles, with his eager pack around him,
Speaker:Where motor vehicles were all forbidden.
Speaker:And he howled there, “So where is it we’re going? Tell us pup, and tell us swiftly,
Speaker:For this human town dismays me,
Speaker:and I would be in the forest,
Speaker:A-running free and fearless
Speaker:with all human things discarded.
Speaker:The sooner we are done,” he said,
Speaker:“the sooner we can be there.”
Speaker:“I think,” said one beside him, not much younger, though he looked it,
Speaker:A touch of dog admixtured with the wolf he bore within him,
Speaker:“That once I skinned my knees there in that playground, by the library.
Speaker:That once I stole some candy from that store, now long since shuttered.
Speaker:That once I waited, sick at heart, just there
Speaker:beneath that elm tree,
Speaker:To catch the bus that leaves the lonely town of Good Intentions
Speaker:And never does come back.” The wolves beside him revved their engines
Speaker:Until their grizzled leader
Speaker:with a growl calmed them to silence,
Speaker:And with a rough caress
Speaker:encouraged once again the telling,
Speaker:“It was this way, I know, I think,
Speaker:I think that I remember.
Speaker:A left just past the vacant lot
Speaker:where used to be a diner,
Speaker:Another left before the Methodist First Congregation,
Speaker:And then a right when you get to the crossroads at the cornfields!”
Speaker:He kicked his bike awake. He took position.
Speaker:And he lead them As does the wolf who catches first the scent upon the snowbank Charge on in joyous hunger
Speaker:with the baying pack behind him.
Speaker:Before a humble ranch house,
Speaker:just outside the city limits,
Speaker:The Pack came to a halt. They stalled their bikes and stopped their motors.
Speaker:They huddled round their youngest,
Speaker:all concern, and masks abandoned,
Speaker:Each plainly and defiantly in wolven shape they kissed him,
Speaker:The grizzled leader caught him tightly,
Speaker:tightly did he hold him.
Speaker:And then he turned.
Speaker:He left them in the gravel driveway waiting.
Speaker:He passed the rusted mailbox, that he once himself had painted.
Speaker:He mounted the worn porch steps,
Speaker:where once he watched the fireflies.
Speaker:He pressed, and heard again, a decades-long familiar doorbell
Speaker:Three times before the deadbolt on the door drew back.
Speaker:A woman Too old to not be old stood there in fear beyond the threshold.
Speaker:But only for a moment.
Speaker:For the wolf before her shifted
Speaker:To face like hers in more than fear.
Speaker:She gasped. She called him
Speaker:“Daniel?” Some privacy we’ll give them.
Speaker:Ere this meeting can be happy
Speaker:Much sorrow must be spoken,
Speaker:and much reconciliation,
Speaker:They each must make assurances,
Speaker:repeated, to the other
Speaker:That despite all appearances, they yet are not a monster.
Speaker:But soon enough he entered,
Speaker:and she welcomed all his brothers,
Speaker:And soon enough reunion was more sweet,
Speaker:and much less bitter,
Speaker:And Wonderbread was broken, for a chicken salad sandwich Supper, and the coffee maker purred upon the counter.
Speaker:And tales he came to telling,
Speaker:of the pack he’d found to love him,
Speaker:Of home they’d made eachother
Speaker:in the forest of the northlands,
Speaker:Of pride and polyamory,
Speaker:of blue moon and bereavement,
Speaker:Of how the wolf had to come to each,
Speaker:to turn and re-beget them.
Speaker:So ere the sun was set
Speaker:she said she understood. She told him
Speaker:That he would yet be welcome, while she lived, in Good Intentions,
Speaker:And all his pack as well. And if a word was said gainst werewolves,
Speaker:Why, she would have a piece of mind to give to those who said it.
Speaker:They left her in the morning,
Speaker:with promises of letters.
Speaker:They roared under the sunrise swift away, though not forever.
Speaker:For any day might be the day that providence and highway
Speaker:Could bring him back, with all his pack, to visit with his mother.
Speaker:Now of course, opinions differ,
Speaker:in Minnehacqua County,
Speaker:On who it was was visited upon them in reunion
Speaker:One cold-front haunted day in June,
Speaker:while yet the moon was waxing:
Speaker:Some say they were a biker gang, and nothing more, whom rumor
Speaker:Inflated has to lycanthropic tall tale in the telling.
Speaker:Some say that they were fugitives,
Speaker:who, sympathy beseeching,
Speaker:Pretended to relation and to prodigal connections.
Speaker:Some think they were conspiracy,
Speaker:though ‘how’ escapes their notions.
Speaker:Some think them merely metaphor. For something else entirely.
Speaker:But I, who claim some kinship with a wolf or two, can tell you
Speaker:That the town of Good Intentions, nowadays, is not as quiet
Speaker:As when it fell forgotten,
Speaker:hid between the rolling hilltops.
Speaker:There you might hear, some evening,
Speaker:underneath the only stoplight
Speaker:The thunder in an engine,
Speaker:echoing across the grasslands,
Speaker:And far-off howl, yet bittersweet in territorial triumph
Speaker:As if some distant wolf once claimed this place
Speaker:as home and heartland,
Speaker:And though he dwelleth here no more,
Speaker:yet still does he remember.
Speaker:This was “The Homecoming of Daniel Usherswell”
Speaker:by Rob MacWolf, read for you by Khaki,
Speaker:your faithful fireside companion.
Speaker:Happy Pride, and Thank you for listening
Speaker:to The Voice of Dog.
