Don Brookes : A Lifetime of Observing Nature, Language, and the Quiet Comedy Between Them
In Talk To The Animals, Don Brookes invites us into a gently comic, quietly reflective world where the familiar sayings we attach to creatures great and small are turned over, examined, and playfully unsettled. The poem has travelled a long road to reach its final form—one that began back in the 1990s, when Brookes was working as a Laboratory Technician. A single thought sparked it: if an elephant never forgets, what happens when you turn that cliché on its head? That question opened the door to decades of returning, revising, trimming, and tinkering, as Brookes explored the menagerie of inherited phrases that colour our language.
It is poetry rooted in lived experience. The rebellious moles who appear in its later lines did not arrive by metaphor alone; they are escapees directly from his allotment in Skelmersdale, where their subversive tunnelling has produced more upheaval than any literary device could reasonably be expected to. That blend of humour, domestic observation, and a long memory for the quirks of British speech gives the poem its grounded charm.
Brookes himself speaks modestly about his writing—“poems, if you can call them that,” he jokes—but the work reveals a patience and attentiveness that only years of revisiting an idea can produce. Now 71, married to his wife Elaine for half a century, and deeply embedded in his community through the Friends of Tawd Valley and the Tawd Valley Allotment Society, he writes with the perspective of someone who understands both the absurdity and the quiet beauty of everyday life.
In the end, Talk To The Animals is not just a light-footed play on clichés; it is an appeal for gentleness, curiosity, and, above all, a hope that “peace will overcome”—whether in language, in nature, or in the shared spaces where both meet.
TALK TO THE ANIMALS
Look an elephant in the eye,
And say you won’t forget,
Ask the owl late at night,
Have you graduated yet?
Tell the monkeys in the zoo,
We’ve found the missing link,
Implore the parrots when they speak,
To say just what they think.Contemplate with a snake,
That they should never lie,
Discuss with the penguins,
Will they ever fly?
Assure the bull in a field of cows,
He can forget his trouble and strife,
Insist the cat who’s sleeps all day,
To go and get a life.If moles become subversive,
Negotiate a deal,
Wonder with a chameleon,
Which one of you is real.Laugh with the hyenas,
Though you didn’t get the joke.
Try and rescue all the Beagles,
Before their life goes up in smoke,Hold a mirror to a peacock,
And shake a tail feather.
Warm the heart of a Polar bear
But don’t mention the weather.Sing with a choir of song birds,
If you like you can even hum.
Collar a dove and tell her,
Peace will overcome.
DON BROOKES
