​The Invention of Pigs

Come our one great bushfire
pigs, sty-released, declined to quit
their pavements of gravel and shit.
Other beasts ran headlong, whipping

off with genitals pinched high.
Human mothers taught their infants creek-dipping.
Fathers galloped, gale-blown blaze stripping
grass at their heels and on by

too swift to ignite any houses.
One horse baked in a tin shed,
naked poultry lay about dead
having been plucked in mid flight

but where pigs had been legion
only fuzzy white hoofprints crowded
upwind over black, B B B
and none stayed feral in our region.

—Les Murray

Next
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Altar Rails and Borders

R. R. Reno

Catholicism in the United States and Europe is heading toward trouble. The presenting issue is immigration. Vice…

How Should Catholics Respond to the Immigration Crisis?

James Hankins

The appointment of Cardinal Robert W. McElroy as Archbishop of Washington, D.C., has been widely interpreted in…

Catholics, Hippocrates, and Reforming American Medicine 

George Weigel

I am the odd man out in a family of medical folk. My maternal grandfather was a…