The Hanging Sheep

Over a moorland beck
A real dead sheep
(Hanging by its own horns)
Swung between two branches;
Like a child in swinging heaven.
The body was decaying —
Opened wide to summer’s sweating air,
The hawks’ blood-lust and ravenous horseflies.
And, all the while, the rotten stench
(At the fullest volume)
Pummeled our nostrils.

Take me, take me, it might have said.
There was no full stop
To end this picture of life, death, and the rest.
Off the carcass went into the nothingworld 
— the sweetest nothing.

We stared voyeuristically.
Stared at the thing.
Rapt and trapped by the concreteness –
The reality of that particular, real death.
A death so actual that we poked it.
We even shuffled around with its coils
Until quite unsure of ourselves.
Then, and only then, did we leave death alone.
We felt for the brainless beast.
What a dumb death!
Just one more life claimed by the moor.

After watching mother swing to death in the wind,
The lambs had looked for proxy mothers.
The lambs were now all alone.
Their bleats infused the moor
As we eyed and eared the surroundings.

There, death is part of life.
It’s not made aesthetic or holy.
It’s not veiled in back-rooms
For folk to poke and pry at.
Bodies are left where they drop.
Dropped to rot in the greedy earth -
That, like a moorish Shylock,
Exacts its spoonful of flesh.
The flesh rots.
Rots as it should do -
By blending with living peat.