(Mangalica swine--Hungarian breed)
Swine are all over the news today. Poor pigs! Blamed now for a pandemic that may or may not occur. Swine are my favorite farm animals. I raised them as a girl and won Grand Champion blue ribbons for them. Here's a poem from my forthcoming (I hope) book, Descent, that takes on the now timely topic of swine. But take a look at that Hungarian swine above. Isn't he/she gorgeous? The next time I go to Hungary I must seek this breed out. I want to scratch a Mangalica's ears.
Wallow
Too close by day, my grandfather’s hogs wallowed.
By night their stink hovered,
hanging over the furrows and salt licks.
Slathered in wallow-mud,
swine sauntered out to the water-trough
slurping it up, slime and all. I knew sows
could be mean, but to think of a pig eating
somebody, that seemed medieval. That pig
could be strung up for homicide once,
having stood trial. No counsel could save him.
Or her. Poor pigs, maligned for their sins.
Is there anything that can be loved
in a pig without risking derision? You look
like the sort of girl who eats the fat
on a pork chop, a frat boy once jeered
at a friend who’d been raised on a farm.
She’d told him she loved her pigs’ noses,
undulating like pink slimy flowers
you see underwater. I wondered,
as she wept with shame and from too much
spiked punch, did pigs think we stank,
the lot of us sniffing each other, the air rank
with animal, no matter the species?
by KSB
(First published The Raleigh News-Observer)
