Skip to main content

Animal poem 3: Eye to eye with an elephant






















Photo: Jaimie Parker

I have always suspected that elephants were very intelligent but I didn't realise quite how intelligent until I confronted one properly in the Kruger park a few years ago. The way it looked at me I felt quite boorish.



I looked at an elephant
And the bastard looked back at me

"Whatcher looking at elephant?"

"Nothing much," it said

"Hey," I said.
"I'm the one who looks at elephants.
Don't you eyeball me."
I've seen that look before.

Let me think.
Where, exactly?

An tall old white lady
Coming out of High and Mighty,
She looked at my gamboling infants underfoot
Then looked at me and said:

"Get those brats out of my way""

In cut glass vowls.
And tinkling consonants.

"What's your problem," I replied.
"To me they're cute."

I came to this park. I paid.
You're here for my amusement.

Elephant.

Let's get that straight.

"Yeah you're big,
But I'll do the sizing up here,

Mate. "

Now, where have I seen that look before?
I think it was. Maybe. Yes.

The last time I was drunk at a party and enjoying a little excess
I grabbed this girl and danced with her
Said I fancied her and vomited on her dress.

Turned out she was getting married the next day.
Her fiancee looked at me just the way
You are looking at me now.

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Well, how was I to know?

"Hey you, elephant!
Want to start something?
Think you're hard enough."
Listen to my monkey chants.
From the other side of that electrified fence.

"Watcher going to do about it,
Elephant?"

The elephant looked at me

"Up yours!"

It said.

Then went.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Aerogramme from Lisa and Richard

To: Mr & Mrs J. Hall, Box 49 Eikenhof (TVL) Johannesburg Afrique du Sud. 28.3.76 Dear John and Nola, Today a week ago we were still in New Delhi with Eve and Tony and the boys and the whole thing looks like a dream. We arrived on the 28.2 in New Delhi and were happy to see the whole family fit and in good health. The boys have grown very much, Phil is just about the size of Tony and the twins are above average. We stayed untill the 22nd March, as our visa ran out and we did not want to go through all the ceremony of asking for an extension. It also got hotter and I don't know how I would have supported the heat. The extra week would also have passed, so we decided not to go to all the trouble with the authorities and leave on the 22nd. I cannot tell you how happy we have been to see such a lovely family, so happy and united. It is rare to experience sucha thing and we have both all the reasons to be proud of them (when I say goth I mean you and us ). There is su

Guardian: Kate Harding's reactionary censorious blog on CiF

It should go without saying... ....that we condemn the scummy prat who called Liskula Cohen : "a psychotic, lying, whoring ... skank" But I disagree with Kate Harding , (in my view a pseudo blogger), posting her blog in the Guardian attacking bloggers. It's a case of set a thief to catch a thief. The mainstream media is irritated by bloggers because they steal its thunder and so they comission people like Kate Harding , people with nothing to say for themselves, apparently, other than that they are feminists, to attack bloggers. I'm black. So I can legitimately attack "angry white old men". I'm a feminist, so I have carte blanche to call all anonymous bloggers "prats." Because yes, that is her erudite response to bloggers. No I don't say that the blogging medium can't be used to attack progressives in whatever context. Of course it can. But to applaud the censorship of a blogger by a billion dollar corporate like Google, and moreov

Guardian books blog fringe: Norman Mailer

FLASHING THE GUARDIAN -- A BOOKS BLOGGERS' REBELLION :  The unheroic censor with a death wish Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation By ACCIACCATURE 3 February 2009 When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – in the blogosphere, people who had read at least two of his books – was split. The army of readers who saw him as one of the most despicable misogynists writing fiction in the 20th century was perfectly matched by warriors on the other side, who raged that the label wasn’t just unwarranted but tantamount to heinous calumny. Before commenters returned to bitching-as-usual, tempers were lost on literary sites all over the net in debating temperatures high enough to bring to mind tiles burning off space shuttles re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. After I'd agreed to a spontaneous suggestion by our good friend Sean Murray -- a pioneer and stalwart of the comments section of The Guardian’s books blog – that we re-