Dead Sheep Poem

[boxofdelights]

This morning we saw sheepskin rugs
Outside the craft shop in the village.

Now we've found one on the hillside,
Soft and creamy-white among the thistles,

Cushioning a rib-cage and a line
Of vertebrae, laid out like stepping-stones.

Nine feet away, the skull
and jawbone, clean as carved ivory.

Crows and maggots cleared off long ago --
The person with the notebook has arrived.

--Wendy Cope

That's from If I Don't Know, which I picked up for lunabee34's poetry jam, but only managed to read just now.

Comments

[lunabee34]

I liked that one, too! The writer as scavenger.

[muninnhuginn]

I'd not read that one before (evidently I'm falling behind with Cope). Very evocative. Can't be recent--since the foot and mouth epidemic farmers have got much better at disposing of dead sheep on the fells. Probably a good thing: I have vivid memories of walking on Calder Fell (in Cumbria) one early Spring day after a spell of snowy weather and there were a couple of dozen frozen or drowned and just left rotting.

It was several years later I acquired my skull on a fellside a couple of valleys over.