I wrote this on a visit to Yorkshire Wildlife Park with my grandson Edward. He seems both fascinated and horrified by the black and white photos of dead tigers in India that are on the fence by the tiger enclosure.
Tiger
She pads down to the silent pool,
rippling stripes dip in and out
of sunlit patches lying in her path.
Slips in, jaws ease open to display
curved scimitars designed to rend
live flesh, lolls a tongue evolved to lick
the pulsing blood of freshly slaughtered prey.
Behind the cage, lenses point and children gasp.
She ignores them all as she ignores the dragonfly
that hovers near her glorious head.
On the fence a sign displays old images;
an animal hung upside down, borne on poles.
Another skinned and proudly splayed
across a colonial floor. A small child
clutches his toy dinosaur and turns his eyes
from dead to living, then back to dead.
Tim Fellows 2021
No comments:
Post a Comment