One of Earth s creatures

I know I will be dismembered.
You know it too,
though you choose not to see.
Why should you care
when it's not your liver
or heart or brain
in the market place?

You savour succulent, steamy aromas,
salivate at the feast that awaits -
my body parts on your plates,
roasted and garnished,
sundered and seared and basted,
while you recoil from thoughts
of my life, the fact that I mourn
my tortured young,
sold piecemeal by the kilo
while flesh is still tender
on bones not fully grown.

You would rather suppress
the realisation that I
am aware of the horrors in store,
that I sense the same
could befall you too,
when I see how you butcher
those of your species
in the name of duty or honour,
calling it war or ethnic cleansing,
always giving bloodlust its due.

We who rate less than collateral damage,
sheep crammed into a stinking boat,
creatures deformed by our cages,
harpooned whales with torsos designed to float,
can never become survivors of Belsen:
where we are bound, no body escapes
alive to bear witness, to tell the tale,
bereavement is denied a place.

We are mere items of trade,
shipped though hell
to the abbattoirs of west and east.
At our demise presides no priest,
grisly carnage is called work,
the massacre of the innocent,
who are not even savage,
whose fate it is
to enter this world with fur or hair,
feathers, or hooves, or paws, or scales;
fins to transit oceans
between hostile shores.

We all know where we are bound,
but we shall never understand why
our language is dismissed as mere sounds,
our feelings deemed of no account,
while our lives are taken without a qualm
for entire populations in harm's way.

We were Earth's archives, its memory cells.
As you ply rapacious forks and knives,
do you spare a thought for the sacrificed
as you crave the space we occupied?

We were creation's gift to time,
but greed decimates our clans, our ways,
as the planet we share with the civilised
sinks deeper in apathy by the day…