Hoof-trimming

The below is an unpublished poem, written for Moortown, the verse-diary of Ted Hughes’s experiences of farming in Devon in the 1970s, but not included in the sequence as published. A few months after Ted purchased the bull, Sexton, he wrote to his brother Gerald: ‘I really love him. It isn’t just his incredible size and beauty — he has a strange, sweet nature, in every respect like an unusual person.’ Sexton remained at Moortown for many years after his working life, and was buried there in 1991. Some time later his remains were moved to Court Green.
 
The fee for this poem is donated to Farms for City Children


 
Sexton’s hooves are too big. They’ve grown
Like Aladdin’s slippers over winter
Pampered in the mattress of straw-dung
Inside the building. Now he’s out
On a baked east-wind April earth, hobbling
Tender-footed like a sea-bather
Coming back over sharp rocks. He can’t rear up
And balance his gravity on a cow
And wheelbarrow her running under him
As he should be doing. And cows are naughty.
They won’t stand and be grateful
For his love-weight, they scoot from under him –
So he follows like a toppling drunkard
Clinging to skirts
His back feet splaying in hoof-pocks hard
As builder’s rubble, till he drops jolt-shock
Onto those sore front feet. Then stands
Not even wanting to walk
Miserable at the mercy
Of his treacherous feet. How well he knows
A bull with poor feet is no bull at all:
One hoof’s worst. The right rear hoof
Is a complete casualty.
 
We get him in. Three or four cows
With him for comforters. He suspects
Something painful planned for him. He wheels
In a small pen, big and unpredictable,
Hiding his nose-ring, shouldering his cows cleverly
Between him and us, swirling his red bulk
Gently and massively. But his play-heave
Can lift a cow off her feet, and we have to dance
A safety dance, defter than his. Only
 
He’s a peaceful soul. He concentrates
On the game for his nose-ring.