I don't know any worthy poems about chinchillas, but I do know that the marvelous Sharon Olds has written a few about various rodents. Here's a favorite:
Forty-One, Alone, No Gerbil
In the strange quiet,
I realize
there’s no one else in the house. No bucktooth
mouth pulls at a stainless-steel teat, no
hairy mammal runs on a treadmill—
Charlie is dead, the last of our children’s half-children.
When our daughter found him lying in the shavings, trans-
mogrified backwards from a living body
into a bolt of rodent bread
she turned her back on early motherhood
and went on single, with nothing. Crackers,
Fluffy, Pretzel, Biscuit, Charlie,
buried on the old farm we bought
where she could know nature. Well, now she knows it
and it sucks. Creatures she loved, mobile and
needy, have gone down stiff and indifferent,
she will not adopt again though she cannot
have children yet, her body like a blueprint
of the understructure for a woman’s body,
so now everything stops for a while,
now I must wait many years
to hear in this house again the faint
powerful call of a young animal.
I don't ever want to live in a home again without living things that depend on me. What a horrible thought.
Hugo: I don't want to complicate your inner life any more than it already is, but it seems to me that your response to this poem could use some... clarification? Particularly coming from someone who is called to vegetarianism.
Posted by: Jonathan Dresner | February 10, 2005 at 11:49 PM
Thanks, Jonathan, for your concern about the complexity of my "inner life"! ;-)
The "living things" reference was part of a deep desire to live as a guardian for companion animals. I don't like the idea of having humans be the only mammals in my house. But obviously, there's a big difference between caring for creatures and eating the,
Posted by: Hugo Schwyzer | February 11, 2005 at 09:04 AM