Ken Stone: Pig Killers

Pig Killers
(Stroud, 1890)

A photographer squeezed a sovereign

from a Baptist farmer rarely given to whim or pride.

They were pig killing and the photograph a century on

shows them pausing at their work.

One looks like a man who had confirmed

his face in a pool, shattered it to drink,

and hurried on. Now he’d glimpse timelessness

contrived by a conjuring lens.

He sensed no contradiction with the meek and mild.

Baptists might disdain to dance, yet slaughter flocks;

salt bacon and plump winter ham.

With nonchalance of a disbeliever,

a younger man stands at the scalding tub,

his knife glints at his hip, but his vest

is too tailored for stabbing and scraping.

He mirrored himself in a drop-slab hut

for this created moment.

A final sow wanes in its blood wallow,

and another, sprawled and shaven on the slab,

threatens to twitch and smudge the scene’s composure.

Children are transfixed in Sunday best,

and the interrupted wife, baker of crackled rind,

nurses an infant with a blurred bonnet—

or did the camera transcend its craft

and bestow an infant aura?

A bespattered farmer immortally fixed to a moment,

and his ripening girls staring out at the future,

are now at the end of light—

all locked in that final camera:

the ground’s obscura.

Ken Stone