Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump
David Bottoms

Loaded on beer and whiskey, we ride
to the dump in carloads
to turn our headlights across the wasted field,
freeze the startled eyes of rats against mounds of rubbish.
Shot in the head, they jump only once, lie still
like dead beer cans.
Shot in the gut or rump, they writhe and try to burrow
into garbage, hide in old truck tires,
rusty oil drums, cardboard boxes scattered across the mounds,
or else drag themselves on forelegs across our beams of light
toward the darkness at the edge of the dump.
It's the light they believe kills.
We drink and load again, let them crawl
for all they're worth into the darkness we're headed for.



I believe the poem by David Bottoms speaks of ignorance. Too often in our day and age people are concerned only with themselves. As a result they do not know what is happening outside their own little world. To look at it on a bigger scale, Americans could be considered ignorant. We live in a land of wealth and prosperity, and are blind to the pains of the world around us. The ignorant take our wealth for granted and may think: how could there be any suffering in the world when everything is fine here. Just hiding from the truth alone will get us nowhere.
In this poem there is some symbolism dealing with ignorance and fear. The lines "It’s the light they believe kills" and "Shot in the gut or rump, they writhe and try to burrow into garbage" by (Bottoms lines 12 and 7-8) symbolize the point that people can be very afraid and ignorant. In this case the rats symbolize people. The light in this case is our ignorance. The shot is the reality that there is suffering outside our world. Like the rats we try to hide from the fact by running from it, or occupying ourselves so we forget about it.