VERMIN
A broken body, matted red,
tossed in the air by wailing hounds.
The quick, brown fox is spinning, dead,
amid the banshee bugle sounds.
The inane braying still abounds
when port is drunk and fables spill,
about the right of man to kill
an animal who, turning back,
stood proud and noble on the hill
and faced the crimson vermin pack.
we've all moved on a long way in the past half-century - if the destruction of a species and self absorbed killing of other species is the crime - where are the great 'sportsmen' from the stars who will visit us and obliterate humans in the same way? let's face it - the fox is no greater a self-centred troublecauser than man himself.
i prefer my sport to be based on carrying a ball across a line of whitewash. inter-species combat just doesn't do it for me.
Ian - Man is a predator and whilst "progress"has subverted the instincts, they have their place in nature, just as hounds will do what hounds do and foxes do what they do. I grew up in the English countryside of half a century ago and recall its occupants as generations of unsentimental realists who practised husbandry and whose hard-nosed acceptance of nature's harsh realities made it possible. The fox was no friend to any species but his own and the enemy of most.
I recall a barn being cleared of rats in ways that would have caused palpitations in today's sentimental breasts had they had been foxes. The crime seems to be to dress up for the event and even worse, ride a horse!
M.C.N
it would garner exactly the same amount of sympathy if the protagonists were dressed in their fancy dress and deemed to call it a 'sport'. Man has no place in setting himself 'above' other animals on this planet - especially when subjecting them to (in)human barbarism in the name of sport.
thanks for the comments
Ian
Powerful and well constructed of its type. The fox - a predator that will decimate a hen-house and not just for food - has received a sort of "Walt Disney-ish" transference of human identification in recent decades. I wonder how much sympathy the large brown rat - against which the "Hand of Man" is always turned - would receive if it were big enough to be chased across the countryside by a pack of hounds and folk on horseback.
Good one, and very topical. I like the formal structure which is tight with good metre and rhyme. May I suggest: 'tossed in air' to keep the strident beat really intact?
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Lynn Dye
Mon 10th Jun 2013 00:45
Good one, Ian, enjoyed this and your sentiment.