The Mower
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
Notes
Where Limón’s grief consumes the body from within, Larkin’s The Mower begins with something brutally external and ordinary. A machine, a hedgehog hidden in the grass, and a death caused without intention but impossible to undo. Guilt arrives because an accidental act still belongs to the world once it has happened; consequence does not wait for intention, and the dead hedgehog becomes an ethical demand on how gently we inhabit a world we can damage without even noticing. For October, decay becomes responsibility. The knowledge that everything living is precarious, and sometimes tenderness begins only after we understand how easily it can be crushed. #PhilipLarkin #Mortality #Decay #Poetry #Grief