Ravens
by Ted Hughes

As we came through the gate to look at the few new
  lambs
On the skyline of lawn smoothness,
A raven bundled itself into air from midfield
And slid away under hard glistenings, low and guilty.
Sheep nibbling, kneeling to nibble the reluctant
  nibbled grass,
Sheep staring, their jaws pausing to think, then
  chewing again,
Then pausing. Over there a new lamb
Just getting up, bumping its mother's nose
As she nibbles the sugar coating off it
While the tattered banners of her triumph swing
  and drip from her rear end.
She sneezes and a glim of water flashes from her rear-
 end.
She sneezes again and again, till she's emptied.
She carries on investigation her new present and
  seeing how it works.
Over here is something else. But you are still
  interested
In that new one, and its new spark of voice,
And its tininess.
Now over here, where the raven was,
Is what interests you. Born dead,
Twisted like a scarf, a lamb of an hour or two,
Its insides, the various jellies and crimsons and
 transparencies
And threads and tissues pulled out
In straight lines, like tent ropes
From its upward belly opened like a lamb-wool
  slipper,
The fine anatomy of silvery ribs on display and the
  cavity,
The head also emptied through the eye-sockets,
The woolly limbs swathed in birth-yolk and impossible
To tell now which in this field of quietly nibbling
  sheep
Was its mother. I explain
That it died being born. We should have been here, to 
  help it
So it died being born. 'And did it cry?' you cry.
I pick up the dangling greasy weight by the hooves
  soft as dogs' pads
That had trodden only womb-water
And its raven-drawn strings dangle and trail,
Its loose head joggles, and 'Did it cry?' you cry again.
Its two-fingered feet splay in their skin between the
  pressures
Of my fingers and thumb. And there is another,
Just born, all black, splaying its tripod, inching in new
  points,
Towards its mother, and testing its note
It finds in its mouth. But you have eyes now
Only for the tattered bundle of throwaway lamb.
'Did it cry?' you keep asking, in a three-year-old field-
  wide
Piercing persistence. 'Oh yes' I say 'it cried'.

Though this one was lucky insofar
As its made the attempt into a warm wind
And its first day of death was blue and warm
The magpies gone quiet with domestic happiness
And skylarks not worrying about anything
And the blackthorn budding confidently
And the skyline of hills, after millions of hard years,
Sitting soft.