Pigs
Pigs - meaning Summary
Brutal Memory of Pig Life
The poem presents a pig's collective voice recalling life before slaughter: wild, growing, and driven by instinct. Mundane, earthy pleasures—rooting, suckling, wallowing—contrast with later industrialized violence hinted at by ropes, cuts, screams and overturned heads. The language collapses human grammar into rough dialect to register animal perspective and numbed memory. The ending conveys dislocation and the residual sensation of being already gone, emphasizing trauma and loss of agency.
Read Complete AnalysesUs all sore cement was we. Not warmed then with glares. Not glutting mush under that pole the lightning's tied to. No farrow-shit in milk to make us randy. Us back in cool god-shit. We ate crisp. We nosed up good rank in the tunnelled bush. Us all fuckers then. And Big, huh? Tusked the balls-biting dog and gutsed him wet. Us shoved down the soft cement of rivers. Us snored the earth hollow, filled farrow, grunted. Never stopped growing. We sloughed, we soughed and balked no weird till the high ridgebacks was us with weight-buried hooves. Or bristly, with milk. Us never knowed like slitting nor hose-biff then. Nor the terrible sheet-cutting screams up ahead. The burnt water kicking. This gone-already feeling here in no place with our heads on upside down.
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