Moorland Stirks Poem by Roger elkin

Six weeks old were the six stirks
when they came to where the sky drags
its blueness from dregs of speedwell and harebell,
and its sunsets from the falcon’s hunger.

After the first day (a dulled-puzzled huddling
at the field’s edge, and fugal mooing as if they’d
just found they’d lost their mothers)
and after a night (mopsing round hedgerows,
chafing the gate and more moaning till morning)
they made the field’s centre, and stood
sad-eyed innocents in wrong-brushed, black
fustian nap, stood – marvelling, exhausted –
up to their knees in seas of buttercup gold.

For weeks, all day long, under enormities of sky,
sharing moor’s beneficence with the larks
and the yellow hares, they have marauded the meadows
with their skittish-kittenish dance: a one-two trot,
then baulk back to a side-step, a sort of paso doble
complete with Catalan head-toss, as if dragging
unborn horns through their topknots. With tiger-stoned
eyes, wide and fiery, staring in terror that cannot be outbred
from long-ago-roaming through oak groves,
they’d offer dog-wet muzzles to outstretched
hands, and rid fingers from grass offerings
with rasping glasspaper tongues.

Now eight months on, they’re almost fully grown.
Recalcitrant adolescents whose jet is fading grey,
they’re plunged to fetlocks in puddled mud and dung.
Trying to saunter in practised nonchalance, they’re
pulled all ways by flies, so loiter at shady corners,
or mope by the stone trough, lower under brows,
rehearse putting the butt in, or muscle at gateways.
And, at night, asleep on the hoof, stand silent as hedgerows
to dream of Europa kneading their heaving loins.

Grown here, accepted and accepting,
they know from blood more ancient than ours
why their haunches suffer and judder at cattle-trucks
rattling past to distant abattoirs:

the myths die hard.