Earthworms

for Geoff Wood

Earthworms, it seems, are made of tongues,
and are able to taste with every inch of their writhing
bodies. What a life of joy they must have,

and a life of horror, to not be able to turn off
life’s every passing flavour. I remember the ones
my father and I used to dig up in the back

garden as bait for our fishing trips. Could they,
I wonder, taste the cold steel of the spade, the shock
of the autumnal air, the heat of our fingers

as we lifted them from the earth, the plastic
of the bag in which we carried them to the river’s edge,
and then, their own blood as we impaled them

on the hooks, the chill of the freshwater, the mouth
of the fish as they were swallowed? What a life, and what
a death – all taste and savour – until the end.

GORDON MEADE

…………………………………………………

From its arresting opening to its satisfying end, this poem explores the connection between the animalistic and the human. In it, the earthworm is not so much lowly as holy, possessing what from a human perspective might be regarded as a superpower, framed in negative terms as an inability not to taste every flavour perpetually.

Like Jorge Luis Borges’s famous short story, ‘Funes the Memorius’, about a boy who is almost crippled by his ability to recall everything in minute detail, Gordon Meade’s poem finds strength in weakness and weakness in strength. And this is in the context of a father-son relationship recalled fondly, as Meade describes the two baiting their hooks with worms on a fishing trip. Is the boy’s heightened sensitivity ‘weak’ in comparison with a father’s archetypal strength? Or is that sensitivity in fact the boy’s strength, preparing him for a career as a poet capable of the visionary celebration of living creatures.

Meade says of the poem that the ideas behind it came from two different sources. First, a conversation with a friend of his which, somewhat surprisingly, took a turn that included the various physical attributes of the earthworm. And, secondly, from the closing lines of an earlier poem, ‘Hooked’, again about the would-be poet’s fishing trips with his father …

                             Him catching what
he had come for, salmon and trout,
and me imagining the pain of being
caught, already hooked on thought.

In his twelve collections of poetry to date, Meade – who hails from Fife in Scotland – has a track record of honouring the creatures of the earth, notably in poems written in response to the work of the Toronto-based photo-journalist and animal rights activist, Jo-Anne McArthur. Into Creative reviewed their 2020 book of poems and photographs, Zoospeak; their 2023 publication, EX-posed: Animal Elegies, is published by Lantern Publishing and Media, New York.