A Dead Hedgehog

I find that looking at one's poems written many years ago it is even more difficult now than then to decide if they are any good! Rereading my poems I immediately recognise the inflections and rhythms which seemed so compelling to me at the time and find it almost impossible to get beyond them to look at and hear the poem as others might. The consequence for 'A Dead Hedgehog' - a poem I remember being very fond of - is that I am quite unsure whether it is a serious and rhythmically convincing discussion of a weighty moral problem or a banal expression of self-evident worries! Others must decide.

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With paws upon an iron kerb

And flattened quarters in the road,
This creature, dead as Banquo’s ghost,
Is stiffly silent under frost,
Become a sort of absent verb
Which mocks the thought of how it towed
Its young ones through a nearby field
To see what food the hedge might yield.

Now will it haunt this peopled spot

To ask a bloody question of
The denizens who could not care
If creatures die beneath a car?
The noisy children shouting, “What?”
Their father blowing on his glove,
Are more concerned that in a room
A warming fire invites them home.

When Banquo at the evil feast

Appeared all bloody and despised
It was to teach the provenance
Of matters stifled in a glance,
That actions which are thought the least,
Or by a curtain go disguised,
Are re-embedded in the heart
Which they proceed to tear apart.

A joint of beef or packaged egg

Are garnered from a local store;
Who thinks upon the loaded gun
That clamps on foreheads one by one?
An animal may dumbly beg
That you should scratch its back some more
But soon, while champing on a bar,
Will bellow in an abattoir.

This tiny hedgehog crushed in blood,

Gone indistinct beneath the night,
Is now an emblem gathered to
The things which tell me what to do.
A tear is lost within the mud,
The whistling wind shrieks, “What is right?”
But few who walk the freezing lane
Will care about this battered stain.

Then think upon the image of

A life which men would gladly live,
Of those who hungered and were fed,
The homeless who were found a bed:
Would not this all-embracing love,
Embellishing the verb “to give”,
Include the animals who share
The earth we husband in our care?

An automatic slaughter is

A coarsening of the moral sense,
And those who glory in their power
As lives are squandered hour by hour
Are those who with a poisoned kiss
Create a sort of violence,
That every creature’s final breath
Might serve an economic death.

The hedgehog will be cleared away

To rot upon a rubbish tip,
A car will pass you in the road
With pomp of some malignant god;
But sometimes at the end of day
A voice will make you bite your lip:
“How shall men live? Will you not mourn
A hedgehog lying bruised and torn?”

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© January 1981