The Invention of Pigs
The Invention of Pigs - meaning Summary
Domestication Amid Disaster
The poem recounts a bushfire that scatters animals and people. Most creatures flee wildly or perish, but pigs stay close to human habitations, trudging upwind across the scorched landscape. Their refusal to revert to feral life is emphasized; the poem treats pigs as marked by domestication and dependency, contrasting human and animal responses to catastrophe and suggesting how environments and human care shape animal behavior.
Read Complete AnalysesCome 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 huddled only fuzzy white hoofprints led upwind over black, B B B and none stayed feral in our region.
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