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The below is an unpublished poem, written for Moortown, the verse-diary of Ted Hughes’s experiences of farming in Devon in the 1970s, but not included in the sequence as published.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. Snatchings
Catch only air or the swipe of his cheek or shoulder.
His wet nose is like a quick fish
In a large muddy pool. But he grows more
And more alarmed. So do we. He plunge-hides
His head under the bellies of his cows
Like a frightened calf. He snorts, he stares
To warn us how dangerous he would be
If he came to be different. A trick –
Calming him with a bucket of ground barley –
Brings his nose-ring close. A grab’s got it.
Immobilised, suddenly surrendered
To his precious nostrils, he admits
We have him.
 
So his delicate nose brings him, reluctant,
Into the tight cage of the crush. Cord
Knots his nose-ring to the structure. Anchored
He rolls gingery eyes, certain, now,
Of pain and indignity. An iron bar
Jammed across behind his back-end bars him
From coming out backwards. Half-inch
Hempen rope hoists his hind hoof,
Cleft sole upwards, to the inspector, holds it
Like a broken limb in a sling. He looks helpless.
Everybody agrees he is helpless.
Nobody is afraid of his eye-rollings.
The vet begins to cut. Wicked little
Hoof knife. Scales and moons of hoof
Start to fly. Three-legged, iron-bound
Sexton protests. The crooked slipper of hoof
Begins to shape up. But nested in the core –
Something painful. The blade’s found it. Sexton
 
Signals every touch. The knife sculpts.
Returns to the guilty quick. Sexton cries
No No in the language
We can ignore. But suddenly the knife knows
Time is running out. It cuts, decided,
Deep, for a cruel kindness.
 
     The iron bar
Jumps clear. The half-inch hemp
Snaps like straw and makes itself scarce.
Sexton’s foot is his own again. And he
Is coming out backwards, as if
Coming in through a doorway forwards. And we
Are early swallows
Above gates and rails. He pushes
Back among his mothers and stands trembling,
Hurting from one end to the other
With a rage he is too amiable
To know what to do with. Blood
Dangles from his nose. That copper ring
Of his slavery
Still knotted where I knotted it, hangs
Broken like a worm. His nostrils
Are wounded but not broken. We release him
With his victory. The copper ring
Makes a memorial bracelet.
 
      After two weeks
Of healing open air – another go.
We have to knock him out with an injection
That would kill outright
A sizeable crowd of people. How he sags
Lower and suddenly horribly older
On his stubborn trestles, how he needs
Half as much knock-out again
And still props himself as if
He might die and stiffen there on his feet,
How we lead him swinging in a tight circle
To topple him, and how he finally founders
In the worsening surf of drug-exhaustion,
Capsizing at last, stretching out
Groaning exactly like a human drunkard
At every helpless breath – now he can be helped.