The Goat

I talked with a goaf.
Alone in the meadow, tethered.
Sated with grass, rainsoaked,
it kept on bleating.

That steady bleating was fellow
to my sadness. I answered
first for a joke and then for grief
whose one voice is endless and unchanging.
I heard this voice
sorrowing in a lonely goat.

In a goat with its semitic face
I heard all other wrongs complain,
and all of life.