Ted Hughes (1930-1998)
Crow Tyrannosaurus[1] (1970)
Creation quaked voices--
It was a cortege
Of mourning and lament[2]
Crow could hear and he looked around fearfully.
The swift's body fled past
Pulsating
With insects
And their anguish, all it had eaten.
The cat's body writhed[3]
Gagging
A tunnel
Of incoming death-struggles, sorrow on sorrow.[4]
And the dog was a bulging filterbag
Of all the deaths it had gulped for flesh and the bones.
It could not digest their screeching finales.
Its shapeless cry was a blort of all these voices.
Even man he was a walking
Abattior
Of innocents--[5]
His brain incinerating their outcry.
Crow thought "Alas
Alas ought I
to stop eating
And try to become the light?"
But his eye saw a grub. And his head, trapsprung, stabbed.
And he listened
And he heard
Weeping[6]
Grubs grubs He stabbed he stabbed
Weeping
Weeping[7]
Weeping he walked and stabbed
Thus came the eye's roundness the ear's deafness. [8][9][10]
Footnotes