The litter in the stable — the straw spread on the floor for animals to lie on — appears in nativity poetry as the material context for the most significant birth in Christian theology, the God of the universe laid in the hay and straw of the manger; A poet might write "she changed the litter in the stall each morning, the fresh straw a small renewal, the animal's comfort a daily act of care that required nothing but the willingness to do it again"; In poems about the intimate relationship between farmers and their animals, the daily spreading of litter — the attention to the comfort of creatures in one's care — represents a form of love expressed not in words but in repeated practical action; The litter of young animals — a litter of piglets, of puppies, of kittens — provides a different poetic image: the simultaneous arrival of multiple vulnerable lives, the mother surrounded by her young, the prolific abundance of mammalian reproduction; The connection between the bedding sense and the scattered-rubbish sense of litter is available to poets: the straw spread on the stable floor is not disorder but a considered arrangement, while litter in the modern sense is the same material displaced from its purpose and meaning; Contemporary farm poets attend to litter as part of the daily physical care that sustains animal life — the unglamorous but essential maintenance work that pastoral idealization tends to omit.