The English poet, Philip Larkin, in his poem The Mower, concludes with the following lines (referring to a hedgehog killed by the titular machine) …
Next morning I got up and it did not./ The first day after a death, the new absence/ Is always the same; we should be careful/ Of each other, we should be kind/ While there is still time.
I read Larkin’s poem years ago and suspect that it lay in the background of my consciousness when I wrote Rabbit, but mine is rather more bleak than Larkin’s poem.
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| Photo by Jane Mosse |
RABBIT
A rabbit, dead out on the lane,
a fellow that I’ve seen before,
unmarked but dead, that much is plain:
no rabbit-running anymore.
I shoo away the buzzing flies:
no sooner done than more alight
around his mouth and dull dead eyes.
All lives have worth but are finite
and this is death, close up, no screen
of hymns or platitudes to hide
its ugliness. Unclean, obscene,
the very end of self, of pride.
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