Poetry and Animals

POEMS OF THE ANIMAL81

so drastically that “now we are their custodians.” By declaring owner-
ship of the entire planet, by creating vast numbers of livestock and other
kinds of domesticated animals, and by altering climate and habitats we
have made all animals dependent upon us. Our difference from other
animals is simply that we have power over them; we control their future
as though they were pets. Yet our need for them as companions, the ease
with which they become companions, evokes an awareness of a com-
mon bond—that we share something primal, that we need each other,
and that we owe animals something. They seek us out now, the poem
suggests, as though they know of this larger dependence. The poem ends
with a story of another animal companion, which provides a stark alle-
gory for the future of such animals.

Bill came home after a fortnight away.

Pot plants had been kicked off the veranda,

there was an awful smell,

and the front door was ajar.

Inside the house

chairs were overturned,

papers and cushions trampled on floors,

and in the bathroom,

wedged against the washbasin,

her putrid flesh held together by hide,

Twinkle, a pony.

A tractor winched the body out.

Presumably Twinkle, abandoned by her owner, was searching for com-
pany or food and died in that part of the house where we deal with our
own waste. There is some irony here in “Twinkle” seeking out the most
private part of the house, as though it was seeking not food but some
measure of interiority. We have made all animals dependent upon us,
the poem suggests, so that to ignore them now means their certain and
miserable end.
By including examples of wild and domesticated animals, Lehmann’s
poem broadens our sense of which animals we ought to care about. But