My Future Grave
By Sharon Fleischer
An Animal Rights Poem from All-Creatures.org

I didn’t know her very long. I am her second daughter.
So young was I, barely weaned, when they sent her off for slaughter.
I didn’t know that’s what it was, why they’d taken her away.
No one ever comes back from there. No one can ever say.
They wrapped a chain around her neck, and tugged and shoved her in.
She gave me one last loving look. I never saw her again.

You may have seen her, just last night. That may have been her flesh.
You didn’t know how kind she was. You only knew how fresh.
Your tongues savor her arms and legs. Your stomachs are her grave.
And very soon I will be next. I am your taste buds’ slave.

Here I stand, unable to move, for your tongues like our flesh tender.
And they inject me now and then, for you don’t like me slender.
If your mother is departed, they buried her in the ground.
But mine was buried in your freezer, once she was nice and round.
Some of you may end up eating my eyes, but gaze into them before you do.
Try hard to understand what I and my kind are going through.

Suddenly they deem me ready. I’m worthy, big and fat.
They march us to our deaths, but I’m not yet aware of that.
We’re shoved into a boxcar in the freezing winter air.
We shiver as a wind picks up, but they just don’t care.
The journey is long and cold. Some of us faint and fall.
When it’s over they rip us from where we stand, our skin stuck to the wall.

They herd us onto something shiny, and suddenly I hear the screams
Of fear of death of the slicing blade, like something out of my dreams.
And I too begin to panic, but by now it’s just too late.
And only you can save me from my upcoming painful fate.
Our blood is flowing like rivers, our bones thrown in the trash,
And all for an insatiable desire for meat, and all for the want of cash.