The Meadow Mouse

It isn't quite Wednesday, but I have a visitor and tomorrow will be busy, so I'm getting a head start! I don't know why I chose this poem, cause it's cute, I guess!

The Meadow Mouse
By Theodore Roethke

I
In a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking
Sleeps the baby mouse I found in the meadow,
Where he trembled and shook beneath a stick
Till I caught him up by the tail and brought him in,
Cradles in my hand.
A little quaker, the whole body of him trembling,
His absurd whiskers sticking out like a cartoon-mouse,
His feet like small leaves,
Little lizard feet,
Whitish and spread wide when he tried to struggle away,
Wriggling like a minuscule puppy.

Now he's eaten his three kinds of cheese and drunk from
his bottle-cap watering trough --
So much he just lies in one corner,
His tail curled under him, his belly big
As his head; his batlike ears
Twitching, tilting toward the least sound.

II

And this morning the show-box house on the back porch is
empty.
Where has he gone, my meadow mouse,
My thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm? --
To run under the hawk's wing,
Under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm
tree,
To live by courtesy of the strike, the snake, the tomcat.

I think of the nestling fallen in the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,
The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising --
All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.