Poem
Clare Pollard
THE PANTHER
THE PANTHER
THE PANTHER
Frayed now, tongue-worn, the legend tellsthat my parents — young and expecting me —
walked beneath drizzle, nests, blood-sprays of berries,
breath-clouds mushrooming as they plotted their future,
when the woods convulsed with a pitiless roar
and thicket shook with the rage of a dark engine,
of dragons, of demons; of hunger made meat.
They ran all the way back to their bungalow.
A week later she heard the growl on radio:
If you hear this sound, beware.
It is a panther about to attack…
As a small girl, I poured over theories:
big cats as escapees from menageries,
Victorian travelling circuses, prehistory, death…
I found a picture: Melanistic Leopard,
the eye like a chalk-pit or toad spawn,
teeth the sour colour of lambswool in the jaw.
And at dusk I sensed them out there; other —
the Beasts of Bolton, Bodmin, the Fen Tiger —
nuzzling a deer’s bowels, careful as burglars.
In this city, now, I had forgotten them
in the scuffle of commonplace violence:
the friend beaten for a bike, his eye
popped out like a tiny moon; the needle-tracked
crackwhores smearing dung on our stair-well;
the lean dark men in hoods who may have guns.
But tonight, as I swallowed some small rejection,
I found myself willing it true:
longing caught in my throat for a panther’s leap into view,
like the opposite of disappointment.
© 2008, Clare Pollard
Publisher: First published on PIW,
Publisher: First published on PIW,
Clare Pollard
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1978)
Clare Pollard grew up in Bolton and later read English at Cambridge University. She now lives in London where she teaches poetry at the City Lit. She has published three collections of poetry with Bloodaxe: The Heavy Petting Zoo (1998), Bedtime (2002) and Look, Clare, Look! (2005). The first of these was largely written while she was still at school and she was subsequently chosen by the Poetry...
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THE PANTHER
Frayed now, tongue-worn, the legend tellsthat my parents — young and expecting me —
walked beneath drizzle, nests, blood-sprays of berries,
breath-clouds mushrooming as they plotted their future,
when the woods convulsed with a pitiless roar
and thicket shook with the rage of a dark engine,
of dragons, of demons; of hunger made meat.
They ran all the way back to their bungalow.
A week later she heard the growl on radio:
If you hear this sound, beware.
It is a panther about to attack…
As a small girl, I poured over theories:
big cats as escapees from menageries,
Victorian travelling circuses, prehistory, death…
I found a picture: Melanistic Leopard,
the eye like a chalk-pit or toad spawn,
teeth the sour colour of lambswool in the jaw.
And at dusk I sensed them out there; other —
the Beasts of Bolton, Bodmin, the Fen Tiger —
nuzzling a deer’s bowels, careful as burglars.
In this city, now, I had forgotten them
in the scuffle of commonplace violence:
the friend beaten for a bike, his eye
popped out like a tiny moon; the needle-tracked
crackwhores smearing dung on our stair-well;
the lean dark men in hoods who may have guns.
But tonight, as I swallowed some small rejection,
I found myself willing it true:
longing caught in my throat for a panther’s leap into view,
like the opposite of disappointment.
THE PANTHER
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