United States, (b. 1942)
Drive to the Pig Farm
- Past clipped yards.
- Nasturtiums hang over slat fences.
- Fields rise out of wounds left by the road.
- Jagged places, healed with lupine, poppies.
- Drive toward he hills.
- Waves of wild carrot, yellow clumps
- of wild mustard. Drive past all these,
- past the small purple-bladed flower
- opening in the shade of live oaks.
- Past the farm with red stables.
- Round the final turn
- mud reaches to the horizon.
- Hills of mud piled with pigs.
- Hundreds of pigs, sprawled
- on their sides, fat haunches limp,
- stiff blond hairs rising
- over the flesh like sparse fur.
- One hunches dog-like,
- two-toed foot under its belly.
- Their feet mince through the stink, old
- potatoes scattered like stones
- over the ground.
- They lift wet noses over barbed wire,
- grunt quietly as we scratch their backs.
- Swarms of pigs, half in,
- half out of warm brown mud.
- Noises from somewhere under their throats,
- insistent as the buzz
- of flies circling their eyes.
- We turn from the fence, pull shut
- the doors of the car and drive,
- drive back to the rows
- of hourse, pastel colors,
- pruned roses climbing the walls.
© Wendy Barker. Winter Chickens and other poems. San Antonio, TX: Corona Publishing. Co. (1990).
About the Poet:
Wendy Barker, United States, (b. 1942), is a poet educator and translator. She is Poet-in-Residence and the Pearl LeWinn Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she has taught since 1982. She regularly teaches senior-level and graduate creative writing workshops.
Her translations, with Saranindranath Tagore, of Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore received the Sourette Diehl Fraser Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. [DES-10/21]