Hare and Moon woodcut by Andrew Waddington: andrewwaddington.co.uk/Woodcuts
March is the time of the hare, an animal I love. The starting point of this poem is an anonymous enigmatic Middle English poem entitled 'Les noms de un leuvre en engleis' or 'The names of the Hare in English', which is reproduced and translated into modern English in the excellent book, 'The Leaping Hare', by George Ewart Evans and David Thomson.
I dare to name the hare
They dub
him traitor,
Old
Turpin,
lurker,
those who
want to kill the hare
and lay
down their hunting weapons
to try
the use of deadly words.
Furze-cat,
they say,
hedge-frisker,
the one
who doesn’t go straight home,
the
animal that dwells in the corn,
the
animal that all men scorn.
Some
would even go so far
(who, for
their own reason,
wish to slay
the hare with curses)
as to insist
that his chief name is
Scoundrel.
I love
the hare
more than
any other creature.
I’ve seen
him rule the shadows
between
the ditch and hedge
as well
as basking in the gory glow
of the
Hunter’s Moon
when, in
gruesome, lycanthropic nights of Autumn,
he dances
in defiance of the fox -
or when, in
the hare-brained dawns of March,
he spars with
leaping shadows of himself
through low-slung
mists,
and tears
across the sparkling, frozen dew.
He is the
freedom we all envy
and in
our dreams would long to emulate.
Which of
us, if there were gods in heaven
to answer
our most secret prayers,
would not
ask to be a hare?
And so
the bitter, jealous souls
who, unlike
him,
can never
stand on open ground
and tap into
the force
that spreads
across the land,
christen him
the
animal that no one dares to name.
For all
these reasons
– and for
many others I never could explain -
I dare to
name the hare,
and call
him:
Spirit of
the Earth.
