The Poetry Corner

Ancestral Memory

By Paul Cameron Brown

Patrician to my plebian, aristocratic leaning versus unbridled backwoods feeling- distinct Old World breeding countering rudest colonial lean-to; his carcass lay, roadworthy, blinking back cold starlight with all the forest as silent voyeur stretching for a look, black fur & quills in disarray like Crazy Horse's warpaint after the Big Horn, this roughneck Canadian porcupine shot clean with bumper & chrome. Then little hedge-pig quaint as porcelain china cup half a world away greeting pints of milk in an English doorway half his scalp torn thru dirty, British lorry choking fumes the petrol in its tank loose.