Another Feeling

By Ruth Stone 1915–2011 Ruth Stone

Once you saw a drove of young pigs

crossing the highway. One of them

pulling his body by the front feet,

the hind legs dragging flat.

Without thinking,

you called the Humane Society.

They came with a net and went for him.

They were matter of fact, uniformed;

there were two of them,

their truck ominous, with a cage.

He was hiding in the weeds. It was then

you saw his eyes. He understood.

He was trembling.

After they took him, you began to suffer regret.

Years later, you remember his misfit body

scrambling to reach the others.

Even at this moment, your heart

is going too fast; your hands sweat.

Reprinted from In the Dark, Copper Canyon Press, 2004, by permission of the author and publisher.

Source: In the Dark (2004)

Biography

Poet Ruth Stone was born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1915 and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She lived in a rural farmhouse in Vermont for much of her life and received widespread recognition relatively late with the publication of Ordinary Words (1999). The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was soon followed by other award-winning collections, including In the Next Galaxy (2002), winner . . .

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