Tiger
My mother ruled the household from her pillows
and kept a tiger underneath the bed.
In dark ancestral aeons
it had wandered from its cave,
‘
Just look how I have tamed it!’ – so she said.
But Thornypaws was watchfully quiescent,
growled threateningly when children disobeyed;
it would cuff an arm or head,
roar in rage at insolence,
crouch lashing-tailed and howl its fierce dismay.
But continents have drifted, seas have surged,
and tigers are extinct here, so they said.
Then in my roaring forties
Thornypaws to my dismay,
took up its lair and growled beneath my bed.
When lured in early childhood by Blake's tiger,
my son stepped through the forests of the night,
he found the fearful symmetry
of hand and eye and brain -
and now the tiger lives with him by right.
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