Disclaimer
by Christopher Steare. Whittington, England
No animals were harmed in the making of this poem.
Great pains were taken that they might feel none.
No foxes were stopped in their tracks by a caesura,
no deer were indented or deleted by a gun.
Consider this poem a barn, each stanza a stall
roomy enough to accommodate a cow
lying at ease with her calf beside her,
a warm thought carefully penned. And now
imagine the others, massed millions of numb
benighted beings in battery, coop or cage,
the morphine monkeys in state-sponsored labs,
holocaust victims of technological rage,
or the rabbits condemned to cosmetic oblivion,
the sheep routinely humbled to their knees,
the pigs that piss themselves on their way to slaughter,
the fish evicted from rivers and seas.
And when we have made a note of this suffering,
can we seriously look in to their sensible eyes
and say that these creatures have only one purpose:
to validate a theory or be pulped into pies?
No. Then let every sentient being that fears
the hypodermic needle or the knife at the throat
find, at the last, asylum in a simile
and live, like those fabulous beasts in the boat,
in the promise of salvation after the flood,
when blood has ceased to flow, in the days to come,
when we, the most violent of animals on earth,
take greater pains, that they might feel none.
