I wrote this poem in the late-1980s, when I felt the first serious stirrings of dissatisfaction with my merely vegetarian lifestyle. I guess the reality hit me for the first time of what happens to animals in order to put animal-derived foods onto the supermarket shelves and the domestic meal table. I had little emotional desire to adopt a vegan lifestyle, but from the date of this poem, integrity would have left me little choice. As my dissatisfaction developed, I also came to realise how hard it is to avoid animal-derived products in the UK.
The poem, is not very good. It is contrived and irretrievably sentimental. However, it serves both as a positioning document, and as a flag for more considered material in the future.
In a prison of iron my body is clamped,
That my newly-born flesh remains tender and sweet.
A machine for companion, and hormones for food:
As food I was born on the altar of meat.
In cacophonous cities of birds I am chained,
In my stench, and my featherless wings, of no worth,
Scream out from the darkness for freedom (or death? -
Which was plotted from lay) just to scratch in the earth.
In an orchard of concrete and steel I am penned
To give birth and to suckle my litters of pork
By white-coated men, who turn blood into gold,
And my womb to the traitorous life of a mawk.
In a candyfloss circus of glitter and fizz
I am fettered with gore until cruelty dies:
When the animal factory fever is stilled,
And mankind sees itself through a harp seal's eyes.
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