If you need a break from the election, read this
Poet and artist Frieda Hughes offers powder-soft fur and tiny pink toes as a timeline cleanse from political punditry
THE SMALL BREEDS FARM PARK, KINGTON
The powder-soft fur of three matching chinchillas
Slipped through my fingers into the carry-crate
To gather as a single puddle of whiskery charcoal,
Their bundled bodies on tiny pink toes
Quivering and rippling in anticipation of change.
And three sibling barn owls clustered like blond lanterns
At the back of their own box in owl-indignation
At being removed from the little bit of safe sky
They have called ‘home’ for eight years.
I was delivering them to the luxury of their new address
Where they would join spectacled, great grey, Eurasian,
Indian scops, wooded, barred, horned and long eared
Other owls. In this childhood fantasy
Of farm park and owl centre I stepped
Between pygmy goats and curly sheep to reach
Six tiny rheas. As if shrunk in the rain they were
Perfect replicas of their fully-grown five-foot selves.
I stroked their stick-legged rubber-necked beginnings
And felt the horseback of their bony ends, their blue-eyes
Measuring me up from the height of my ankles.