REBECCA HAWKES

Is it cruelty

If the sheep has a broken leg?

If the girl and her townie friend come across the sheep
on their way to the river, towels over their shoulders?
If they are already marked by the gorse etching
blood dialect on their shins, and bearing all kinds
of new beginnings with the burrs latched in their
jean shorts and hook grass in their socks,
two rough and tumble kids roaming a track
only they have memorised?

If there is nobody else around to notice the sheep,
and no nearby adult to call for help?

If the sheep tries to get up when it sees them but can't?
If the sheep's eye rolls back in its head, hazel
iris nebula billowing around the flat black
pupil? If they are two shadows that blot out
the sun reflected in said wet eye?

If the farm girl kneels down, strokes the noble
ridge of its nose, its fine elfin bone structure?
If the sheep lays still, making velvety huffs
into the palm of her hand? If the sheep not raising
itself and running seems like a kind of permission?
If they truly believe it wants to be handled and helped?

If both girls consider themselves earnestly to be druids
or nondescript mystics at home with the cycle of life and death?
If both girls kneel by the sheep and lay their hands
on it to will up all their healing power?

If the sheep stays down, not struggling, not
bleating, staring up with its one skyward eye?

If they think hard about what is merciful?

If they agree on what mercy means?
If, having no knife, they select a large stone?
If the rock is a sandstone, a river stone, rounded,
a tumbled greywacke boulder?

If it takes both of the girls to lift the stone?

If they are two shadows that blot out the sun,
holding a round black shadow that grows larger
in the sheep's eye?

If the stone hits the skull with a sick quiet thud
that is barely a crack?

If the stone rolls a little way and they have to fetch
it from the undergrowth?

If the stone hits the skull with a sick quiet thud
that is barely a crack? If the sheep makes no noise,
just stares straight up, blinking its eye? If the
stone hits the skull with a sick quiet thud that is barely
a crack? If a thin stream of blood
crawls brightly from one nostril?

If the stone hits the skull with a sick quiet thud
that is barely a crack? If they had expected it to be
quicker than this? If the stone hits the skull
with a sick quiet thud that is barely a crack?

If they had expected it take one cinematic blow,
maybe two, but now they don't know what to do,
and they are not crying exactly though their noses
are running clear snot, but they had already agreed
on what mercy meant?

If, after all this exertion, the bone in the sheep's brow
is crushed but not caved in?

If they have lifted the stone and lifted the stone
and dropped and dropped it and it no longer
feels at all like mercy?

If the sheep tries to get up but can't?

Can they walk away from it?

Can they still go swimming?

Rebecca Hawkes is a Pōneke-based poet and painter who grew up on a sheep and beef farm near Methven. She is the author of the chapbook, Softcore Coldsores, in AUP New Poets 5 (Auckland University Press). Her first book, Meat Lovers (AUP, 2022), won Best First International Collection in the UK poet laureate's ecopoetry award, the Laurel Prize. She is a co-editor for the online literary journal Sweet Mammalian and the climate-poetry anthology No Other Place to Stand (AUP, 2022).

Hawkes comments: 'This was one of the poems I was nervous about including in Meat Lovers. I worried perhaps it went too far—into the cruelties available to children, questions of agricultural death-ethics, the repetition and length. But it's also one people have responded to viscerally, especially rural folk who have had to make similar choices on the meanings of mercy—and has opened up some compassionate, challenging conversations.'

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