Jon Silkin (December 2, 1930 – November 25, 1997) was a British poet.
Excerpt from The Peaceable Kingdom
All the animals in my poems go into the ark
The human beings walk in the great dark
The bad dark and the good dark. They walk
Shivering under the small lamp light
And the road has two ways to go and the humans none.
====
WORM
Jon Silkin
Look out, they say, for yourself.
The worm doesn’t. It is blind
As a sloe; its death by cutting,
Bitter. Its oozed length is ringed,
With parts swollen. Cold and blind
It is graspable, and writhes
In your hot hand; a small snake, unvenomous.
Its seeds furred and moist
It sexes by lying beside another,
In its eking conjunction of seed
Wriggling and worm-like.
Its ganglia are in its head,
And if this is severed
It must grow backwards.
It is lowly, useful, pink. It breaks
Tons of soil, gorging the humus
Its whole length; its shit a fine cast
Coiled in heaps, a burial mound, or like a shell
Made by a dead snail.
It has a life, which is virtuous
As a farmer’s, making his own food.
Passionless as a hoe, sometimes, persistent.
Does not want to kill a thing.