The Pigs

My grey-eyed father kept pigs on his farm

In Tuscany. Like troubled bowels all night

They muttered in my childhood dreams, and grumbled

Slovenly in moonlight, sprawled in night-slush,

While chill winds dried the mud upon their hides.

I lay in the faint glow of oil-lamps,

In a musk-scented stillness,

And from the icy paddocks heard the pigs.

My thoughts were haunted by pig-greed, how pigs

Surge to their food-troughs, trample on each other,

And grunt and clamber swilling themselves full.

Often we emptied food on top of them,

So that they swam in muck. And then one day

When the wind splattered us with dust, my father

Heard a pig squealing, crushed beneath the press,

And we began to stone the pigs, and drew

Blood with our stones, but they just shook their buttocks,

And grunted, and still tore at cabbage leaves.

Passing a dozing boar one summer morning

My father pointed at two dead-pan eyes

Which rolled up quizzing me (and yet its head

And snout snoozed motionless, and flies

Fed and hopped undisturbed among the bristles).

Only a pig, my father now explained,

Could glance out of the corner of its eye.

I watch two bead-eyes turn and show

Their whites like death-flesh.

One dusk this huge old boar escaped and chased

Me through an olive-grove upon a hillside.

Dumpy, it thundered after me,

With murder in its eyes, like someone damned,

A glow of Hades perfuming the air.

That night my father took me in his arms

And told me that of all the animals

Only pigs knew of death

And knew we merely fattened them for slaughter.

Puddles of hatred against man, they wallowed

In greed, despair and viciousness,

Careless of clinging slops and vegetable scraps,

And the sows even eating their own young.

The knowledge of death made pigs into pigs.

Later that year this old boar ate

A peasant woman's baby and was burned

Alive one night by public ceremony.

My father stood there by my side,

His toga billowing in the rush of heat,

But in the flames my child-eyes saw

Not a pig, but myself,

Writhing with stump-legs and with envious eyes

Watching the men who calmly watched my death.

-Les Murray