Lorna Dee Cervantes - "Uncle's First Rabbit" lyrics

He was a good boy making his way through the Santa Barbara pines, sighting the blast of fluff as he leveled the rifle, and the terrible singing began. He was ten years old, hunting my grandpa's supper. He had dreamed of running, shouldering the rifle to town, selling it, and taking the next train out. Fifty years have pa**ed and he still hears that rabbit “just like a baby.” He remembers how the rabbit stopped keening under the bu*t of his rifle, how he brought it home with tears streaming down his blood soaked jacket. “That ba*tard. That ba*tard.” He cried all night and the week after, remembering that voice like his dead baby sister's, remembering his father's drunken kicking that had pushed her into birth. She had a voice like that, growing faint at its end; his mother rocking, softly, keening. He dreamed of running, running the ba*tard out of his life. He would forget them, run down the hill, leave his mother's silent waters, and the sounds of beating night after night. When war came, he took the man's vow. He was finally leaving and taking the ba*tard's last bloodline with him. At war's end, he could still hear her, her soft body stiffening under water like a shark's. The color of the water, darkening, soaking, as he clung to what was left of a ship's gun. Ten long hours off the coast of Okinawa, he sang so he wouldn't hear them. He pounded their voices out of his head, and awakened to find himself slugging the bloodied face of his wife. Fifty years have pa**ed and he has not run the way he dreamed. The Paradise pines shadow the bleak hills to his home. His hunting hounds, dead now. His father, long dead. His wife, dying, hacking in the bed she has not let him enter for the last thirty years. He stands looking, he mouths the words, “Die you b**h. I'll live to watch you die.” He turns, entering their moss-soft livingroom. He watches out the picture window and remembers running: how he'll take the new pickup to town, sell it, and get the next train out.