United States, (b. 1973)
Pigs (see Swine)
According to official Library of Congress rules,
one must classify children’s books about pigs
under “pigs” and adult books about pigs under
“swine”; the terms are not interchangeable.
- On the books, the rules for subjects long assigned:
- For children’s tales, use pigs; for grown-ups’, prefer swine.
- How now, white sow, on which one will you dine?
- Wilbur is “some pig”; Napoleon, some swine.
- But there’s a book whose pigskin bindings shine
- For youth and aged alike, in which the terms align,
- Pigs and swine; and in its stories, sow supine,
- Your litter’s better bacon in a poke done up with twine.
- The Evangels spin a story from the silken ears of swine:
- The swineherds eat their lunches by the mountain’s steep decline,
- By the tombs, where wind’s perfumed with marjoram and thyme,
- With the sweet smell of the cedars, the sweet reek of the swine;
- And by the tombs, a bruised man roots for acorns, as benign
- In his iron fetters as the Son of Man, the Vine,
- Who withers branches, makes blood out of wine.
- The shackled shouting man’s a temple with no shrine,
- Or two thousand shrines, and every one maligned
- By other gods, other incarnations, so this text opines:
- Gods unclean as hordes of hogs, scores of swine,
- Hooves divided, eyes savage, tails serpentine.
- O lardlings, your Lord cometh, and you know not his design.
- He sails across still waters and his lips are caked with brine.
- Piglets, he will not give this generation a sign,
- Unless that sign be read in demons, in the bristling flesh of swine.
- For swine, see pneuma, see daimon, see the soul unconfined.
- See incarnation thistle-pink with hock and flank and rind.
- See madman counsel madman, chapter, verse, and line.
- See spirits seek for bodies, and see the spirits find.
- See the book consign the flock, loin and heart and mind,
- To a tumble through the salty sky, their transport undefined.
- Over the cliff, swine see pigs, and pigs see swine—
- Legion, yet one: porcine, insane, divine.
© Melissa Range. The Hudson Review, Spring 2009, Volume LXII, No. 1. https://hudsonreview.com/.
About the Poet:
Melissa Range, United States, (b. 1973), is a poet and educator. She is the author of Scriptorium (2016), selected for the National Poetry Series by Tracy K. Smith, and Horse and Rider (2010). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, Image, New England Review, The Paris Review, Subtropics, and other journals.
Range has received awards and fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, among others. She teaches creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. [DES-01/22]
Additional information:
- Melissa Range – https://melissarange.com/