Rougarou

image borrowed from bing

Rougarou

“All of us are God’s creatures, but some of us

are more creature than others.”--Anonymous

Its legend crawled down from the Laurention Mountains,

and its folklore materialized in Cajun Bayou speak,

as twenty deep descendants of Acacia, 

those French-Canadian peoples from the Maritimes 

who fled south following the French & Indian Wars, 

way south, all the way to Southern Louisiana,

where some traditionalist parents still frighten their

children with wild tales about the Boogie-Wolf,

the Loup-Garou, the wolfman of mythos.

It was written that it would hunt down and slay

misbehaving offspring, and errant Catholics

who refused to follow Church edicts & mandates;

and that the Bitten ones, those afflicted, were always

living amongst them, that they remained under

the Rougarou spell for seven years, and each

flare up, or bloody incident, lasted 101 days.

During daylight the shape-shifters returned to

human form, completely oblivious to their

dark night persona. When its evil conscription

lapsed, it would transfer the lupine duties

through its last bite to some other person. 

In the deepest swamps of Louisiana where

folks live far from urban centers, speaking

only Cajun, killing alligators and catching fish

for their meager subsistence, they know for a fact

that actual Rougarou haunt the hours after midnight,

and its death-rot stench and ungodly howls keep

them barricaded tightly within 

their spindly heron-legged cabins, 

keeping their hounds inside with them, 

knowing that in the morning they would find 

their chained up gator yard-dogs torn to pieces. 

For them legends have actual teeth. 

Glenn Buttkus

March 2013

Posted over on dVerse Poets-Open Link Night

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