This poem, from the current issue of the The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2014/01/06/140106po_poem_twitchell), moved me:

Roadkill

I want to see things as they are

without me. Why, I don’t know.

As a kid I always looked

at roadkill close up, and poked

a stick into it. I want to look at death

with eyes like my own baby eyes,

not yet blinded by knowledge.

I told this to my friend the monk,

and he said, Want, want, want.

Chase Twichell

It reminded me of Philip Larkin, and his poem The Mower, which has a similar impact every time I read it:

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found

A hedgehog jammed against up the blades,

Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.

Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world,

Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence

Is always the same. We should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind

While there is still time.

Philip Larkin

CQ