“Bless the Feral Hog” by Laura Van Prooyen

. . . Saint Francis / put his hand on the creased forehead

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch / blessings of earth

-Galway Kinnell, “St. Francis and the Sow”

 

The ‘Hog Apocalypse’ may finally be on the horizon.

-Texas Department of Agriculture, Commissioner Sid Miller

 

I wasn’t bothered by the hogs. In fact,

I welcomed the pack of them foraging in nearby brush,

 

an antidote to my loneliness.

At the Hill Country cabin, my companion was the voice

 

of the radio newscaster I’d listen to afternoons in the parked car,

doors flung open to the country breeze, to hogs

 

dotting the landscape. Sid Miller is not the only one

who’d call me a fool. If he has his way, farmers

 

will lure swine with poison feed so they slowly, painfully

bleed as their innards bubble up blue. I know

 

the hogs cause damage; they scrape land bare,

burrow holes deep and wide enough to hold a sleeping

 

man. Wasn’t it enough to encourage hunters in helicopters

to shoot from the sky? What if St. Francis

 

put his hand on the hairy forehead

of one of these sows? Or the creased, wide, shiny

 

forehead of Sid? If the blessings of the earth

were spoken into us, and we began remembering

 

through our own thick length,

from the top of our heads through our tired hearts,

 

what would we find? The problem of the pigs

began on a boat. The colonizer

 

told the wild hog the loveliness of taking,

of digging into the dirt with her snout, rooting up

 

all she wants. And the sow remembered

through her own heart about hunger. Her appetite

 

streamed into fourteen mouths sucking at her teats,

into writhing bodies she would nudge off, snorting

 

go now, eat. Run in a pack and trample

what you please. Eat every flowering thing.