From All-Creatures.org

Animal Rights Poetry By Noël Sweeney

Blues for Harriet Tubman

Araminta Ross watched the burning cross
While her name flickered in the flame
When her Master sold her body
To Massa whose cruelty flowed through his veins
So she vowed to break the chains
Forged by law and stamped by birth
She broke them all and escaped on the run
To prove to the world her true worth

Up North she became Harriet Tubman
Risked her life in the Deep South
Saving slaves down in Maryland
Condemned to death from every Slavers’ mouth
Each saved slave marked out her grave
A bounty placed on her head
Didn’t stop her rescuing fugitives
Though the Slavers wanted her dead

Harriet beat them one and all
Living and fighting for freedom
Then died when she was 93
They placed her face on an American stamp
No longer cast as a runaway scamp
She became the face of black history

So can you measure the distance for me
It’s so dark here I can hardly see
I’m blinded by the light of law and our history

Emmilene Pankhurst stepped beyond the law
When she hurled a cobbled stone
Through the Prime Minister’s window
Sending the Suffragettes signed message home
They became State enemies
Force-fed women in prison
Pankhurst became one more human foie gras
To destroy her and her vision

Louise Hageby followed in the same vein
Her freedom fight fuelled by rage
She saw the plight of her sisters
The same as victims in a scientist’s cage
They saw the law was used
In the cruel ‘Brown Dog Affair’
They smashed the shambles of a science lab
To show the Government they cared

They fought the police in the streets
Then they torched the Gardens at Kew
Tube-fed by force they died and roared
Until the Government released them all
Freed from their cell they could enter the Hall
Then got what they fought for by a World War

So can you measure the distance for me
It’s so dark here I can hardly see
I’m blinded by the light of law and our history

Ronnie Lee lived and worked in the law
For those facing a sentence
Serving the feckless and reckless
Seeking justice while they paid their penance
He aimed to support the weak
Their tongue often in a knot
Sometimes trying to prove their innocence
So they’re not in a cell to rot
Then his sense of ‘what is justice’ shifted
When he saw the law was grim
Treating those who were different
Yet in many ways they were just like him
Looking in his cracked mirror
Figured they too should be free
As a lawyer he formed the A.L.F.
A beacon for their liberty

He changed and became a burglar
In his fight for their liberty
Saved the caged slaves in misery
Clad in black he burgled the basement lab
At night he became an underground Sab
Freeing our prisoners from agony

So can you measure the distance for me
It’s so dark here I can hardly see
I’m blinded by the light of law and our history

I’m still not close enough to see
Who is blessed and who is cursed
Rescuing a slave in a field and one in a laboratory
Who is blessed and who is cursed
Rescuing a slave in prison and one in a laboratory
So help me unravel the laws bitter-sweet mystery
To see the difference between these three
Harriet and Louise and renegade Ronnie Lee

© Noel Sweeney, 2023

 

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