Valerie Gillies: Summer Bull

A blusterer of a bull
stayed with us that summer.
He was full of surprising moves.
One morning he ran easily as the minotaur
up the dark alley by the byre.

Hearing his locomotive sound
I came to the kitchen doorway
to see my boy standing out
in the open yard watching the hard-head
circle and cut-circle around him.

The bull tossed hens through the air,
and clipped biddies flew for the first time.
He whirled them in eddies
bore them up and over the boy
at a standstill, smiling.

Tiptoe, in profile, a Cretan vaulter
poised for the swift ton of violence
which left him untouched at the storm centre.
Only my dead thought lay on the ground
the day my dearborn kept his nerve.


From Bed of Stone (1994). Dramatic but perhaps with too much description to be fully successful. Or does it need a longer, more pastoral lead-in as contrast to the drama?