Raised by Wolves

Born without race or culture

the perennial outsider

never knowing the secret code

that unlocks human exhange.

Laughing wrongly,

crying wrongly,

never fawning rightly,

never a proper genuflection.

Perpetual horror

of incorrectness,

never feigning civilization rearing

for long.

Revealed and reviled in youth,

bent and strange to common eyes,

but known and loved

by only one and One.

Raised by wolves,

loved as wolves can give love,

except for the Maker of wolves.

One love for wolf and man

redeems even the wolf.

Outcasts love outcasts,

and know their own.

Some try to be like wolves,

and envy those born to it.

William E. Rushman, June 1996