United States, (b. 1925)
Plaster Pig
- It didn’t work that the bores I grew up with
- smeared my door with lard
- for I was enlightened and walked with the rest
- in the mountains of Italy on Easter morning
- and went to St. John’s on Christmas Eve;
- and neither does anyone I know
- keep a plaster pig in his living room
- for it is not what goes into the snout,
- and you will forgive me
- whether you like it or not
- for wasn’t it being afraid of the pig
- that drove us there in the first place
- and wasn’t it God in the second,
- and it had bristles in the third,
- and the lungs were too small
- and it was as smart as a fox terrier
- and lived in shit.
- And it turns wild in a second like nothing else
- and someone once told me the male
- has a cock that twists around like a corkscrew
- and for those reasons I won’t eat it.
About the Poet:
Gerald Stern, United States, (b. 1925), poet, essayist, educator. Stern was raised in a Jewish household in Pittsburgh‚ a detail of his childhood that greatly influenced his life. He attended both the University of Pittsburgh (BA) and Columbia University (MA) and has attended the University of Paris for post-graduate study. The author of twenty collections of poetry and four books of essays, Stern has taught literature and creative writing at Temple University, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Raritan Valley Community College, and Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Since 2009, Stern has been distinguished poet-in-residence and a member of the faculty of Drew University’s graduate programme for a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in poetry. He received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1998 for This Time: New and Selected Poems, and was named as a finalist in 1991 for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Leaving Another Kingdom: Selected Poems. In 2000, New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman appointed Stern as the state’s first poet laureate. [DES-07/22]