From All-Creatures.org

Animal Rights Poetry By Noël Sweeney

The First Thing we do is let's Kill all the Lawyers

The animals figured enough was enough
No longer prepared to accept such stuff
Now the gloves were well and truly off
Way past the time to start playing rough
So all at once the whippoorwill
Gave a shrill no tongue could quell
Every last one in the crowded Courtroom
Gathered all their strength together
They knew it was now or never
Their lives could only be saved
If they were prepared to sever
The complete caboodle tongues of liars
By taking a lesson from Shakespeare:
The first thing we do is let’s kill all the lawyers

Then that is precisely what they did
As the roles were reversed for all time
Without a sheltered port in the storm
When the battle-cry went up as primed
Each struck with an arrowed heart
Every animal there took them apart

With strength and soul and blood pumping
Red-hot topsy-turvy and high jumping
Straight from their thumping multiple-hearts
Proving the liars and lawyers were the same
Equally they knew that they were all to blame
Each in their own way descendants of Descartes

As the Lord Chief Justice breathed his last
He asked with a plaintive plea: ‘Why me?
What have I ever done except tried to be fair?’
‘Ah’ answered the pig with a sarcastic snort,
‘This is just us with our own sense of justice
Indulging in a kind of payback-time sport
You are in our arena and we make the rules
So all humans are imprisoned in our fort
We are no longer your plaything tools
There is a feeling called belief we lost long ago
We learned the thief is a judge in a new robe
We are taking back everything you pilfered
As the self-appointed ghost of Dick the Butcher
This is your first and last visit to the future
Now is the time for us to blow you a mort
As the first criminal in our Kangaroo Court’

© Noel Sweeney, 2023

 

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