Today's poem is by Jeanne Wagner

Mount Madonna's Last White Deer
        A shy and ghostly beauty once drew crowds
        but is now destined to live, and die, alone.
                —The San Jose Mercury news

You with your coat of no colors,
like me, you're one of those
who can't blend.
Who's born with a dangerous
refusal for camouflage.
White doe, with no stripes or spots,
no savanna-gold pelt
to mimic the blessings of sun-shafts
or brown autumn grasses,
who refuses to call it hide
because you need to bear it all.
The blank stare of your body,
a backdrop
for light's rebounding waves.
I'd like to think it a proud rebuttal
to conformity.
But honestly, it's only a lack
of pigmentation.
Incomplete unicorn, posing there
without that vestigial horn we love
prodding the air,
are you even conscious of being
an outlier, the way I was
those summers in a hot suburb,
baring my pale body poolside,
exposed in skin without its coppery tone,
without its proper armor.
It's amour propré.
I thought I'd failed, wrapped
as I was in a body
that seemed wanting, like this page
I write on now.

Copyright © 2025 Jeanne Wagner All rights reserved
from One Needful Song
Catamaran Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission