Three pigs (Psalm 104)
Neil Millar – 3 October 2021
I’m going to do something different this morning and order my reflection around
three poems. Three poems about pigs.
Why poetry? American poet Denise Levertov has said that, ‘Insofar as poetry
has a social function, it is to awaken sleepers by means other than shock’. Good
poetry opens our eyes to see the world more truly; it tunes us into the subtler
frequencies of feeling and reality, helps us realise what in some sense we already
know, but haven’t fully recognised. Poetry is a form of wisdom literature and in that
sense, says Australian poet Les Murray, it is inherently ‘religious’. It’s not that there
is something called ‘poetry’, a subset of which has religious or devotional subject
matter. Rather, good poetry is itself religious. It connects and reconnects us to the
whole of ourselves and our knowing, and the whole of reality. That’s what I’m
hoping might happen for us today as we think by means of these poems about our
relationship with animals, and particularly domestic animals – the animals that work
with and for us, that in so many ways succour and sustain us.
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