Davies, Hilary

The Prisoner of Katyn

1. “I have no interest now in what goes on outside:
2. After forty years you build your hell or palace
3. From the sticks they give you. I have only these
4. And they determine what manner of house I live in.
5. It is like this: always early morning,
6. And there are many pigs about me –
7. I was taking them to look for acorns in the wood.
8. I loved my pigs, had given each one a nickname,
9. Knew where each had a wart or strange knot in the hide
10. That you could put your thumb in like a fingerprint.
11. Some had just littered, and there was one of which
12. I was fondest, a small female, marbled black and gold.
13. That morning she ran just ahead of me, enjoying
14. The cool berries: it was the first time she had run free,
15. And she pushed at the dead leaves, the cold earth,
16. With her tiny snout. All around us the mists coiled
17. Like wood nymphs turning the trees to ghosts
18. With their long embraces; the hogs were centaurs
19. In an enchanted wood.
20.  
21. And then, in ones and twos,
22. The cries started: through the pale O of the glades
23. This squealing of a stuck boar coming closer and closer
24. Till on all sides burst out of the silence running men,
25. Their mouths round and red as apples as they went down,
26. My pigs in a welter amongst them screaming and bolting
27. Into the executioners’ rifles. When it was finished,
28. We heaved them together into the dug earth,
29. Watched their bodies curl like sticks of incense
30. In the milky air. Dead leaves were shovelled over
31. To make it new.
32.  
33. These were the last things that I saw outside;
34. Through these last windows I count each twig
35. And chart which way the first man blundered,
36. I recompose what kind of noise each man made when he died.
37. This is the house I walk in: it is always morning
38. And I am driving pigs into the spellbound wood.”