Cow #138

There’s a space that swells around a creature freed from tooth and claw.

I have watched you rise to fill it, seen you gambol like a goof

When you saw the feast we set you; watched you lie down safe at night,

Rocked to sleep by graphs and budgets and a vaccination plan.

But a rabbit heart still trembles in your mighty aurochs breast.

It’s betrayed you for ten thousand years, and it betrays you now:

For the snarling snap of bloody fangs is scarred so deep that still

The merest shadow of its memory drives you straight into our snares.

Dulled by breeding, dulled by habit, and now by your wasting illness,

You are easy to outsmart, and I walk you to the gun.

With a sure hand and a single bullet that you’ll never see,

Your true assassin waits to drop you like a puppet while you graze.

So it’s done, your little life, with its frustrations and its joys,

And the few great sorrows, 138, that we have dealt to you –

All played out, in fewer years than it will take (the doctors say)

For what remains of my grandmother’s mind to melt straight through her fingers.

She’ll be scrabbling after fading faces flaking off like skin,

Ten more years, until her very life has all sloughed from the bone,

And her rabbit heart that dogged her all her days is all that’s left,

Dodging shadows in a nameless panic, clutching at her hair.

For all the wrongs we’ve done you, 138, I do believe:

We dispatched you with more kindness than we sometimes show ourselves.

Are we as kind as nature? I have asked it every day.

With my little life I’ve tried to keep the balance of the debt.

In another life we might be comrades, on some patch of soil.

With what bounty we could spare, we’d help to raise each other’s children,

And I’d hold you safely at the close and softly slip the knife.

Both our fates would rise and fall upon the whims of wind and weather.

It’s a fucked up world, and I did not intend to be your god;

Never asked for self-awareness as I deal out life and death.

As I walk you to your gentle doom, I’m dragging my own guts,

While elsewhere the wolf is sleeping soundly, stuffed with meat and blood.

But I couldn’t look away; had to bloody my own hands;

Had to plunge in shoulder deep into the arsehole of our natures

To be sure that I could diagnose our sickness for myself.

Well I’ll tell you if I ever think I find it, 138.