THE BIRTHDAY LITTER

Where was it? In the soukh? The loud bazaar
Where Lawrence Durrel pulled the string
Quartet from out his old Paterian hat?....
No, not the zooman,Piggles. I see you twitch
Your pink prick
Ears. That one was Gerald or was it Gerard?
It hardly matters now those ears are deaf and gone
And you are pork and bacon
And some no doubt will find it just a little odd
A saint should still be chatting to his pig who is so
Dead and mostly eaten.
It was indeed the soukh in Alexandria.
There now it's said straight out.
We might have saved ourselves a lot of time
But straight out isn't poetry I guess.
I saw you and the other pretty piglings.
Pink and a girl you were, which rather spoils my joke
About the pink prick
Of your deaf dead ears,
-not deaf in life of course, but in death deaf,-
But though the litter must have had its share
of boys and girls, odd words I know to use
Speaking of squeaking
Piglings,
Piglings and piglettes would have been more fun
But I'm not for neology or larks
At least not when I'm writing lines for you
Who are so
Dead.
Your gender, as they like to say these days,
I did not see and not from modesty
But, like some spoiltforchoice bi-sexual
I fancied one and was not too concerned
Which kind first came to hand
And only later when we were alone
Did I discover what you dared to be.

Sell me a suckling! The best of all your litter.
It is my birthday so let's make it cheap.
We haggled and we soon agreed a price.
I popped you in my poke the way one does.