Hartman, Charles O.

The Pigfoot Rebellion

1. When the hair is carefully trimmed away
2. You find in the pig’s forefoot a little hole
3. Through which the legion of devils bow in and out.
4.  
5. Say they enter on a summer morning,
6. Leaving the marks of their tiny claws as six
7. Small rings. Then, ‘please the pigs,’
8.  
9. As the Saxons say, those trotters flash
10. In as fiddle a jig as you who listen
11. Candidly will hear from any warm
12.  
13. Sly singer in the mud: “Oh the mud is good,
14. There’s plenty of good to be found in slops,
15. And the best of the good is a beast in shade.
16.  
17. They’ll slit my ear and cast me out
18. Unfit for human consumption. Bub,
19. I’ll follow anyone home who feeds me, yes,
20.  
21. And live to a hundred and five or ten.” Oh trim
22. The hair from a pig’s forefoot; I’ll show you why
23. A poke is best from the inside. And a sty.