Work Toad

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison –
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts-
They don’t end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
they seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets – and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.

Phillip Larkin.

Nearly a whole week away from the garden, and such a week! Perfect crystal weather and every flower I have ever grown exploding into riotous technicolour glory, without me to admire them. I almost resent them their beauty and liberty, but just a snatched few minutes with them after work and my lungs expand, my body relaxes and an inane smile suffuses my face.
Just knowing they exist and my cats are hunting amongst them makes the awful corporate crap a little more bearable.
Winston presented me with a baby slow worm this morning, a single bead of bright blood on its smooth skin from his claw or fang. I slipped it back into the compost heap and chased Winston away . I think if he had caught the work toad and killed it, I would have been delighted.

Advertisement