A piece born from one phrase, ‘cloven-hoofed creatures’ heard today at a Quaker meeting. I was thinking of cruelty. This is a lament for the part it plays in human lives.
Cloven-Hoofed Creature
It is time to speak of cruelty, that old rusty nail stuck to your shoe when you look down and find, infuriatingly, he is still there; for he was hammered in some time ago.
After eons and eons of red fists and faces; years of hammering at windows and doors; after all that blubbing and never any sorry. The Prohibition Years so long drawn out; fit after fit of pique, still he will not let go. Some say it is lack of muscle, some of ego, but it is cruelty all the same and it is not for this Moses went up to the Mount and bellowed for God to listen; this was his land long ago. After the desert fires and the threat of fists and the sand in your eyes and your blindness. After he ransacked the bottle and still will not leave you ‘though you pull until your nails turn puce-blue-and-red.
Wedged in tightly, you are a cloven- hoofed creature divided from the other animals and bearing their sorrow and woes. Cloven from us, from all mankind, who can only cry along with their Master, “So what are you?” A cow, a pig, a goat, a sheep, a deer, a buffalo, which are you? A llama!
How silly they look hemmed in behind the fence when they should be running wild. Two toes, you only have two toes, so how fast can you run? Bound or leap or jump, can you? Not if you are a cow or a pig or a buffalo ‘though they can charge those beasts -- see how they charge towards you -- and Pond Man turns his head towards the fence. A stiff night, a long night tending to the cattle, for these fields are his as he slips in and out of the shadows. Dawn comes, and dusk, and it is the same old cycle of clamours and woes.
Guardian and steward and God above some say, the animals do: the man left in charge of holding room for sanctuary after the creatures have been taken hostage from the arc two by two; the flimsy human covenant, where, despite supervision, Cruelty creeps in with his barren ideas and fallow fields; his fences sprawling and un-mended after all these years. Eons and eons of yawning gaps covered in thistles the dogs bark at; and the animals, riled and angry, swish their tails at the neglected species for there are several in this town; several stunted species with debts and dues waving their fists at you.
Never forget we are in a town: this is not the wilderness, and we must all get along, but look! That nail in your shoe is still there though you try to pull it out with a spanner, with a hammer, a hooked claw, a wrench. The shape is not quite right: too large, too small, too octagonal, too square, too ringed; for Master Cruelty has wedged his way in and his shape remains stuck but invisible. Buzzing and hovering, a winged creature taunting the nose-ringed bull and her sow. They were never a couple, who said so?
So you toss and turn at night and remember the Lord who saith this: ‘Whatever parts the hoof and is cloven-footed and chews the cud, you may eat.’ And so Master Cruelty eats; he eats and there remains not much of you between your feet. Two toes and no skin, only bone. Two toes only, for he has pulled off the rest. Fi-fo-fo-fum I smell the blood of a poor battered cow. Crushed against the fence last night by an oak tree that fell across her spine. No time to moo, but a rapid death. A quick slaughter and straight to the feast. Rum and apple pie and an ox turning on a spit and the cow watched from the corner of the field, her head turned sideways, still considering death and where she might go, if only she were one of the species born fortunate enough to know.
She looks down at her feet, Poor Cow; cloven-hoofed and pointing at the sky, she hears the thunderclap predicted pulling at the roots of the trees still left standing as she tries to swish her tail from behind and finds nothing but a scrawny shadow.