Murray, Les

Australia, (b. 1938)

Pigs

  1. Us all on sore cement was we.
  2. Not warmed then with glares. Not glutting mush
  3. under that pole the lightning’s tied to.
  4. No farrow-shit in milk to make us randy.
  5. Us back in cool god-shit. We ate crisp.
  6. We nosed up good rank in the tunnelled bush.
  7. Us all fuckers then. And Big, huh? Tusked
  8. the balls-biting dog and gutsed him wet.
  9. Us shoved down the soft cement of rivers.
  10. Us snored the earth hollow, filled farrow, grunted.
  11. Never stopped growing. We sloughed, we soughed
  12. and balked no weird till the high ridgebacks was us
  13. with weight-buried hooves. Or bristly, with milk.
  14. Us never knowed like slitting nor hose-biff then.
  15. Nor the terrible sheet-cutting screams up ahead.
  16. The burnt water kicking. This gone-already feeling
  17. here in no place with our heads on upside down.

 Les Murray. Translations from the Natural World. Sydney: Isabella Press (1992).

The Invention of Pigs

  1. Come our one great bushfire
  2. pigs, sty-released, declined to quit
  3. their pavements of gravel and shit.
  4. Other beasts ran headlong, whipping
  5.  
  6. off with genitals pinched high.
  7. Human mothers taught their infants creek-dipping.
  8. Fathers galloped, gale-blown blaze stripping
  9. grass at their heels and on by
  10.  
  11. too swift to ignite any houses.
  12. One horse baked in a tin shed,
  13. naked poultry lay about dead
  14. having been plucked in mid flight
  15.  
  16. but where pigs had huddled
  17. only fuzzy white hoofprints led
  18. upwind over black, B B B
  19. and none stayed feral in our region.

 Les Murray. On Bunyah. Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press (2017).

Blood

  1.  
  2. Pig-crowds in successive, screaming pens
  3. We still to greedy drinking, trough by trough,
  4. Tusk-heavy boars, fat mud-beslabbered sows:
  5. Gahn, let him drink, you slut, you’ve had enough!
  6.  
  7. Laughing and grave by turns, in milky boots,
  8. We stand and yarn, and whet our butcher’s knife,
  9. Sling cobs of corn–hey, careful of his nuts!
  10. It’s made you cruel, all that smart city life.
  11.  
  12. In paper spills, we roll coarse, sweet tobacco.
  13. That’s him down there, the one we’ll have to catch,
  14. That little Berkshire with the pointy ears.
  15. I call him Georgie. Here, you got a match?
  16.  
  17. The shadow of a cloud moves down the ridge,
  18. On summer hills, a patch of autumn light.
  19. My cousin sheathes in dirt his priestly knife.
  20. They say pigs see the wind. You think that’s right?
  21.  
  22. I couldn’t say. It sounds like a good motto.
  23. There are some poets–Yah! get back, you sods.
  24. Let him drink his fill: it’s his last feed.
  25. He’ll get some peaches after. Hell, what odds?
  26.  
  27. I’m sentimental–not like these damn flies.
  28. Beyond the circle of my jabbing stick
  29. Excited, mobbing pigs roll puzzled eyes,
  30. Peer at our favourite munching, and the thick
  31.  
  32. Peach-drool adrip from his froth-whiskered snout.
  33. Grunting, reek of sties. He’s finished now.
  34. Melon-sized and muscular, with shrieks
  35. The pig is seized and bundled anyhow
  36.  
  37. His twisting strength permits, then sternly held.
  38. My cousin tests his knife, sights for the heart
  39. And sinks the blade with one long, even push.
  40. A wild scream bursts as knife and victim part
  41.  
  42. And hits the showering heavens as our beast
  43. Flees straight downfield, choked in his pumping gush
  44. That feeds the earth, and drags him to his knees–
  45. Bleed, Georgie, pump! And with a long-legged rush
  46.  
  47. My cousin is beside the thing he killed
  48. And pommels it, and lifts it to the sun:
  49. I should have knocked him out, poor little bloke.
  50. It gets the blood out if you let them run.
  51.  
  52. We hold the dangling meat. Wet on its chest
  53. The narrow cut, the tulip of slow blood.
  54. We better go. We’ve got to scald him next.
  55. Looking at me, my cousin shakes his head:
  56.  
  57. What’s up, old son? You butchered things before …
  58. It’s made you squeamish, all that city life.
  59. Sly gentleness regards me, and I smile:
  60. You’re wrong, you know. I’ll go and fetch the knife.
  61.  
  62. I walk back up the trail of crowding flies,
  63. Back to the knife which pours deep blood, and frees
  64. Sun, fence and hill, each to its holy place.
  65. Strong in my valleys, I may walk at ease.
  66.  
  67. A world I thought sky-lost by leaning ships
  68. In the depth of our life–I’m in that world once more.
  69. Looking down, we praise for its firm flesh
  70. The creature killed according to the Law.

 Les Murray. The Weatherboard Cathedral. Sydney: Angus and Robertson (1969).

The Pigs
For Chris Koch

  1. My grey-eyed father kept pigs on his farm
  2. In Tuscany. Like troubled bowels all night
  3. They muttered in my childhood dreams, and grumbled
  4. Slovenly in moonlight, sprawled in night-slush,
  5. While chill winds dried the mud upon their hides.
  6. I lay in the faint glow of oil-lamps,
  7. In a musk-scented stillness,
  8. And from the icy paddocks heard the pigs.
  9.  
  10. My thoughts were haunted by pig-greed, how pigs
  11. Surge to their food-troughs, trample on each other,
  12. And grunt and clamber swilling themselves full.
  13. Often we emptied food on top of them,
  14. So that they swam in muck. And then one day
  15. When the wind splattered us with dust, my father
  16. Heard a pig squealing, crushed beneath the press,
  17. And we began to stone the pigs, and drew
  18. Blood with our stones, but they just shook their buttocks,
  19. And grunted, and still tore at cabbage leaves.
  20.  
  21. Passing a dozing boar one summer morning
  22. My father pointed at two dead-pan eyes
  23. Which rolled up quizzing me (and yet its head
  24. And snout snoozed motionless, and flies
  25. Fed and hopped undisturbed among the bristles).
  26. Only a pig, my father now explained,
  27. Could glance out of the corner of its eye.
  28. I watch two bead-eyes turn and show
  29. Their whites like death-flesh.
  30.  
  31. One dusk this huge old boar escaped and chased
  32. Me through an olive-grove upon a hillside.
  33. Dumpy, it thundered after me,
  34. With murder in its eyes, like someone damned,
  35. A glow of Hades perfuming the air.
  36. That night my father took me in his arms
  37. And told me that of all the animals
  38. Only pigs knew of death
  39.  
  40. And knew we merely fattened them for slaughter.
  41. Puddles of hatred against man, they wallowed
  42. In greed, despair and viciousness,
  43. Careless of clinging slops and vegetable scraps,
  44. And the sows even eating their own young.
  45. The knowledge of death made pigs into pigs.
  46.  
  47. Later that year this old boar ate
  48. A peasant woman’s baby and was burned
  49. Alive one night by public ceremony.
  50. My father stood there by my side,
  51. His toga billowing in the rush of heat,
  52. But in the flames my child-eyes saw
  53. Not a pig, but myself,
  54. Writhing with stump-legs and with envious eyes
  55. Watching the men who calmly watched my death.

 Les Murray. The Ilex Tree, with Geoffrey Lehmann. Canberra, NSW: Australian National University (1965).

About the Poet:

Leslie Allan “Les” Murray, Australia, (b. 1938), is a poet, anthologist and critic. Murray is Australia’s leading poet and one of the greatest contemporary poets writing in English.

Murray has won many literary awards, including the Grace Leven Prize (1980 and 1990), the Petrarch Prize (1995), and the prestigious TS Eliot Award (1996). In 1999 he was awarded the Queens Gold Medal for Poetry on the recommendation of Ted Hughes. [DES-03/18]

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