The Hyenas by chant

I don reckon it's that clear. I liked it alot though. Particularly... "one of them puts his hands on his head" A very nice observation.

um it didn;t seem transparent to me? i didn't get it. am i thick?!

I don't find it too transparent either, I particularly like this bit... 'Hyenas are usually noisy. The noise to drown out the shame. The kind of things they hide' A.

Personally I liked the way the poem opened. I found them chewing on a corpse. Never said who'd killed it. Lisa

I didn't think it was transparent, but I think if there's a particular group of people a person distrusts, they'll tend to interpret it as being about them. I kinda thought it might be about opinion columnists, but that's just because I read a Julie Burchill column recently. I like the line about their shadows being of men. At first, it might seem like an over-obvious drilling-the-point-home kind of statement, but if you look at it another way, isn't it using 'men' as a term for the ordinary - suggesting that these creatures are arrogant and deluded, forgetting they're mortal men.

That was very badly phrased. I'm in a rush.

Tony, thanks for starting the thread, Pesky, spack, 27, camus, Lisa, Jack, thanks for taking the time to read the poem and comment on it. i started out with the last image, that of animals with human shadows, and then worked backwards to make the poem. i guess the concluding couplet is superfluous, meaning-wise, but i liked the image and retained it for that reason. rita, thanks for starting your thead on the poem too. i think i want to disagree with your proposition that ascribing human properties to animals vilifies them, though. it is hard not to ascribe human (even bad human) properties without also ascribing human rights. it is when we see the animal kingdom as 'other' rather than as akin to ourselves in some fundamental way that its existence is jeopardised, i think. thus the pathetic fallacy may be a fallacy, but i think life is less at risk if identified as similar, connected, than if it is identified as alien.

liked it, it made me think a lot more than some of the stuff I have read here. simple but complex, transparent on the surface but then, oh shit, wait a minute...