Here is a photo of me and my lino print, "Ted Hughes, Jaguar", at the Poetry Cafe and the Haunts of the Poets exhibition!
(Sorry for the quality of this second pic it's a photo taken on my mobile!)
The Jaguar
The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion
Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.
It might be painted on a nursery wall.
But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes
On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him
More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.
Ted Hughes
(Ted worked for two days at London Zoo. At the zoo he stood "for most of the day" doing the washing up for the zoo's restaurant. The jaguar cage was opposite him and he used to watch the jaguar in the cage pacing up and down.)
