The Friday Poem on 29/07/22
We chose Graham Mort’s poem ‘The Day Cattle Broke Through the Fence at the Outbreak of the Ukraine War’ to be our Friday Poem this week because we really like the way the rustic realism gives way to a brief outburst of the surreal. The combination of blue eyes and yellow ear tag, and the young bull’s encroachment onto foreign pastures, tell us what it’s all about — if only real life were as simple as the bull choosing to return to its own territory. It’s a poem that works on a number of levels, and we like it.
The Day Cattle Broke Through the Fence at the Outbreak of the Ukraine War
They were Belted Galloways, black with milky
cummerbunds, grazing in the field below gardens
between mole hills and thistles above the beck
that seemed absorbed in its own language.
She looked up and there was the bullock — one
of last year’s progeny — snatching at grass this
side of the barbed wire fence. Barbed wire had
tamed prairies but today the bull had somehow
stepped over it or between it with its yellow
ear tags dangling — a drunken dancer at a tipsy
wedding. So now there were cattle in the gardens
instead of in the meadow. Everything seemed
disordered and when she approached, backing
it against the fence, the bullock was spooked
and reared back throwing clods of soil from
its hooves. What to do? She turned her back
so her blue eyes wouldn’t terrify — they
were like senseless lightning flashes to a half-
grown bull — and — long story short — when
she turned back the bullock had performed
its rustic polka and was in the field again
heading towards its family, snorting disdain
its hide a haunch of pure night
its white sash laundered by the sun.
