Pete Hay

 Pete Hay is a Tasmanian and writes of people and places, and of environmental concerns.  This poem, 'Possums in the Book of Kells', offers an explanation for a cluster of small animals among the elaborate illustrations of the  Book of Kells: not mice or cats, he says, but possums.  


‘A strange group of animals’. Mice perhaps,
or kittens perched bizarre upon adult backs.
That does stretch a long catgut, O my fuddled scholars!
They are not mice. Not cats. Not remotely. Soft-eyed,
wet- and sharp-snouted, prehensile-tailed, marsupialine,
these are the possums – the ringtails – of my ovata bush.

Across Wallace’s Line, westward night-lumbering,
they cross mountain passes, the sinking isthmi,
skirt treeless sands, thread belts of forest mast by mast,
shrink past the yellow eyes of cunning hunters,
breathe silently in the roof-tree dark
of trading dhows, junks, proas, triremes.

And fetch up here in Brendan’s Fair Isle,
cosy and secret in the shadowed cloisters
of a County Meath monastery.
They have made a monkey out of Wallace –
and of my compadres who sell them short.
Tomorrow New Zealand. But today the world.

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