Seeing strange wildlife on holiday
And being disbelieved by parents, later,
Is a common enough experience
(It happened to me outside a guesthouse in Grasmere.)
But when the same deer showed up
At opposite ends of the country
(Like atoms proving quantum entanglement
On mammal scale)
Nobody’s dad was fooled twice.
Unless
Those ragged, fish-boned deer visit the children
Destined to become poets.
And all of us,
In some forgotten notebook
Have written the same lines.
But even then,
You were the only one who did it right.
Tom Juniper Poetry 