Brock

written by


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Small wonder
he’s not been sighted all winter; 
this old brock’s
been to Normandy and back

through the tunnels and trenches 
of his subconscious.
I 1 is father fell victim
to mustard-gas at the Somme;

one of his sons lost a paw 
to a gin-trap at Lisbellaw:
another drills
on the Antrim hills’

still-molten lava
in a moth-eaten Balaclava.
An elaborate
system of foxholes and duckboards

leads to the terminal moraine 
of an ex-linen baron’s
croquet-lawn
where he’s part-time groundsman.

I would find it somewhat infra dig
to dismiss him simply as a pig 
or heed Gerald of Wales’
tall tales

of badgers keeping badger-slaves. 
For when he shuffles
across the esker
I glimpse my grandfather’s whiskers

stained with tobacco-pollen.
When he piddles against a bullaun 
I know he carries bovine TB
but what I see

is my father in his Sunday suit’s 
bespoke lime and lignite,
patrolling his now-diminished estate 
and taking stock of this and that.

© Paul Muldoon