Poem of the Day: ‘Butchering’

Today’s Poem of the Day continues the Sun’s week-long celebration of poet and translator Rhina Espaillat. Like “Here,” the poem that opened this week, “Butchering” gives us Ms. Espaillat as a master of the Shakespearean sonnet. This sonnet form builds its argument, and its emotional heft, through a full three rhymed abab quatrains. Here, twelve pentameter lines construct the portrait of a grandmother “toughened by the farm . . . inured to life / and death alike.” End rhymes, juxtaposing such words as “knife” and “life,” do additional work in knitting together this woman who has built a carapace around herself, so hard that even the sufferings of sick people fail to move her to gentleness. By the time the poem arrives at the cows whose calves are marked for death, it has constructed not only a story but a momentum of expectation. What surprises is the devastating understatement of the closing couplet, the unexpected crack in the tough woman’s carapace. Butchering by Rhina P. Espaillat My mother’s mother, toughened by the farm, hardened by infants’ burials, used a knife and swung an axe as if her woman’s arm wielded a man’s hard will. Inured to life and death alike, “What ails you now?” she’d say ungently to the sick. She fed them, too, roughly but well, and took the blood away — and washed the dead, if there was that to do. She told us children how the cows could sense when their own calves were marked for butchering, and how they lowed, their wordless eloquence impossible to still with anything — sweet clover, or her unremitting care. She told it simply, but she faltered there. ___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘Butchering’

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